


Backstory

by candle_beck



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-22
Updated: 2011-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:44:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candle_beck/pseuds/candle_beck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why you are the way you are--this is the explanation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backstory

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted August 2006.

Backstory  
By Candle Beck

 

2000

In July, Zito makes the trip from Sacramento that Mulder made three months ago.

Tinderbox gold hills and fields of windmills line the highway. The temperature has cracked triple-digits for the fourth straight day, and the air conditioning on the bus is mostly useless, smelling like gasoline. Zito’s drenched in sweat by the time they roll into Oakland, shirt plastered to his back.

Six hours before the game, Zito doesn’t really want to bother with finding a hotel just yet, so he haunts the clubhouse. Someone’s in the cages, thwacking baseballs into the net. Zito’s locker is hastily put together, a swatch of duct tape with his name in black Sharpie slapped on top, three new white jerseys in a row.

Zito is shaking, pawing through his suitcase in search of a CD he lost two years ago. He calls his mom and his sister and half the guys from Trip-A, but his phone keeps cutting out and anyway, he doesn’t have much to say. Nothing’s happened yet—he’s just been called up.

The team starts to trickle in, familiar by name and face. Zito knows some of them from the system and others from television. They bang him on the shoulders and fuck with his hair and he smacks their hands away, curving his back, hissing.

Somebody puts on some rap music, and Zito has trouble hearing properly, catching the last half of sentences, a fuzz of words. He drinks a cup of coffee and fifteen minutes later, he’s wired worse than he’s ever been before, breaking mirrors with his bare hands.

Mulder arrives with his edges blurred. Zito sees the light in Mulder’s face when their eyes meet, because Cape Cod and Vancouver and Sacramento were important stops along the way, but Mulder skates by without a word. Like there’s nothing between them. Zito scowls, gnawing on his thumbnail. Mulder knows better than to play dumb.

Made brave by whatever the fuck is in that coffee, Zito crosses over to him and jabs Mulder’s arm. Mulder’s lip curls because he’s never liked being poked at, and Zito grins big.

“Mark fucking Mulder, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

Mulder gives him a look and takes off his shirt. Still skinny as all hell, hipbones and collarbones and ribs making him look dangerous, stupid spiky hair and Zito wonders at how half a season in the majors hasn’t changed him a bit.

“You just got in?” Mulder asks.

“Well. Few hours ago. But yeah.”

“Cool. Advice: don’t make eye contact with anyone until you’ve been here for at least a month.”

Zito nods and plops down on a chair, taking note of where Mulder’s jeans are tugged down and there’s an indentation in the skin of his hip. Mulder’s knuckles loom in his peripheral vision as he flips the collar of his shirt neatly down on the hanger. Zito has been chasing him since they were nineteen, though only in earnest for the past season and a half, when Mulder was the other lefty and never had to play in Visalia.

He clears his throat. They both turn to watch as Eric Chavez gets bear-hugged and lifted off his feet by Jason Giambi. Zito’s thumb starts bleeding where his teeth have torn too deep.

“We broke the windows of your old place the other night,” Zito tells him, distracted.

“Yeah?” Mulder lets that bemused, weirdly cocky grin break on his face, always hits Zito like lightning in water. “How come?”

Zito shrugs. Rocks don’t cut like baseballs, hard to aim, hard to paint the black. Zito had been top-flight drunk and burning, bus ticket folded in his front pocket, Mark Mulder’s silent Sacramento apartment building rising up in the moonlight like an army against him.

“Seemed like the thing to do.”

Mulder snorts. “Sure.” He hangs up his shirt in his locker and reveals a Texas-shaped bruise under his shoulder blade. “You should come out with us tonight. Get to know some of the guys.”

“I know you,” Zito says without thinking. His heart is going so fast.

“Barely,” Mulder answers, lying, and he cracks his knuckles on his hip. “And I think your locker’s over there, dude.”

Mulder is not-so-subtly trying to get rid of him, but he should have learned by now that it won’t work. Zito stretches his legs out and shakes his head to get his hair out of his eyes, smiles. “Think I like it better over here.”

Two weeks they spent together in Vancouver, three in Sacramento. Three years ago, one whole summer in Cape Cod. Mulder doesn’t like it when things get complicated. Zito once saw Mulder twisted like a rag on the floor of a hotel room somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s easy to forget stuff like that.

In Oakland, they have better than two months and a clean slate to fuck up, but Zito has never really believed in fate, anyway.

*

1997

Nineteen years old on a wooden float, bucked by the mild Atlantic waves, it was the day before the fourth of July and Zito was so happy. The Cape Cod Baseball League was for real, pitching workshops in the mornings and scouts in the stands. Three thousand miles away from school and everyone he loved, Zito wanted this summer to bead out forever.

The float was carpeted with slippery plastic grass, chafing Zito’s back and elbows. He’d been out here on the water for about an hour, listening to the finger-snaps of far-away convenience-store fireworks, kids starting the celebration early. His buddy had swam back in search of beer or a Ziploc in which to smuggle a joint and lighter, but Zito didn’t miss him much. The starchy sunlight sank so heavy into Zito’s eyes that everything turned white at the corners.

Cape Cod smelled like pollen and salt, fresh asphalt, and Zito had never let his own potential get to him. He could make friends anywhere, unburdened by expectation in the estimation of others, sure of himself.

The water broke, and Zito rose up onto his elbows. A pair of hands latched onto the side of the float, a vaguely familiar face rising from the ocean. Everyone in the Cape League looked like someone Zito knew.

“Hey,” the boy said, surprise in his wet blue eyes.

“Hello.”

The boy’s mouth thinned down to almost nothing. “Saw you from the beach. Thought you were. Thought you were someone else.”

Zito shrugged, what can I say, and the boy hiked himself out of the water and he wasn’t a boy at all, not with those shoulders, that washed chest. Zito swallowed, grinned as his companion knelt on the bright fake green, sat back on his heels.

“The fuck are you doing out here alone?”

Sitting all the way up, Zito shrugged again. “Waiting for beer.” He was graced with a quick smile, rolled eyes, kinda like getting gut-punched. The guy was wearing dark blue shorts and Zito could see their shirts together on the beach, blurry red alongside blurry yellow.

“I’ve seen you around,” the guy stated.

“Yeah, probably. Small world, etcetera.”

“You play for Wareham, yeah?”

Zito nodded and pushed his hair out of his eyes. Twenty minutes out of the water and he was baked, bone-dry. The guy was possibly the best thing he’d seen all day, and it’d been a pretty good day.

The guy looked off over the ocean, neat cut of his ribs around his side, short hair bristling. Zito wondered if he was an outfielder, those legs, or a first baseman, all that height folded up on the float. Zito wished it was tomorrow, nighttime and the fireworks, the black sky, the two of them on this float under different circumstances.

“I’m hungry,” Zito said, surprising himself. “Let’s go get a burger.”

The guy glanced at him, calculating and so cool it hurt. “What about your beer?”

“There’s beer on dry land.” Zito showed his very best look, young in the set of his mouth, the clarity of his forehead, canting his wrist so the sunlight hit the bracelet he wore, glass beads throwing specks of blue onto his face. He could do anything, pitch in the spotlight game and black out tonight and wake up into the Fourth of July.

The guy stood, water rolling off his shoulders. “Sure. Fuckin’ bored, anyway.”

Zito got up and offered him his hand. “Barry.”

Nice firm handshake, banker in another life. “Mark.”

Then he dove, swam like he was steam moving in skin.

*

Mulder lives in a brand-new condo near the bay, and he takes Zito back because Zito can’t remember how to get to his hotel. It’s Zito’s fourth day as a major league pitcher. He’s so drunk he might be dying.

“Mark, Mark,” he says, hanging onto Mulder’s arm for fear of being misplaced. “This is crazy.”

Mulder futilely attempts to shake him off, fumbling for his keys. He’s drunk too, not as bad as Zito, but Zito can tell by the way Mulder squints at the door like there are two of them. “You being drunk is not crazy.”

“I am not drunk,” Zito protests, but he’s giggling. He’s not proving anything. Mulder is warm under his shirt, Zito’s hand pushed up under his sleeve, and he doesn’t remember doing that. “I am a fucking major leaguer.”

Mulder sighs, his arm shifting under Zito’s hand. “Yeah, me too.” He finally gets the door open, and Zito gets an impression of gray shadow and a gleam of silver from what must be the kitchen, static-charged carpet.

“This is nice,” he remarks, nodding stupidly. Mulder deposits him on the couch and stumbles off. Zito stares up at the ceiling and thinks circularly that there’s no one in this city that he’s known longer than he’s known Mulder, and three years isn’t a very good narrative, but at twenty-two years old, Zito doesn’t know much about history, anyway.

Mulder returns with slick bottles of water and that’s just so perfectly Mulder, buying cases of water at Costco and carefully stocking his refrigerator, that Zito barks out a strange laugh and feels his eyes burn with tears.

Sprawling out beside Zito on the couch, Mulder presses the bottle to his forehead, his cheek. The air conditioning is humming and whirring, but the heat has come in with them, stuck in their pores, thick as wool. Zito stares without shame at the wet patches on Mulder’s face.

“You’re an idiot,” Mulder tells him, his head back and his face tilted up. “Can’t try and outdrink Huddy.”

“I’m bigger’n him,” Zito mumbles.

“Yeah, that really seemed to help you out.” Mulder’s mouth twists, though his voice doesn’t change inflection. It took Zito a long time to learn the signs of Mulder being sarcastic.

They rest for a moment, spinning idly in place. Mulder’s throat clicks as he swallows. Zito wants to talk, something about being here in the major leagues and how he says things and the next day it ends up in the newspaper. He spends his days watching tape and eating free candy bars, his mouth stained and sweet and his arms hanging loose from his shoulders. The field is perfect like nothing in his life has ever been.

Mulder doesn’t see the same things Zito does. Mulder takes it for granted, even with the wreck that his rookie year has been so far, even with Sacramento still just Billy Beane’s word and an hour’s drive away.

“Mark,” Zito says, tasting it carefully. Mulder hums. He’s not really paying attention. “Am I staying here tonight?”

“That was my understanding of the situation, yeah.”

Zito glances at him, Mulder’s neck and the powder burns on his shirt, the full collapse of Mulder with his legs spread apart and the bottle of water balanced neatly on his hip, fingers lightly keeping it upright.

“I didn’t mean to get so drunk.”

“You never do, man.”

“Talk like this happens all the time, like, like, a _habit_ or something. You haven’t even seen me in three months.”

Rolling his head to the side, Mulder blinks at him slowly. He’s drunk too, he can’t say shit.

“You really broke my windows?”

Zito laughs into his hand, half-yawning. “They’re not your windows anymore.” He pictures himself, several years down the line, standing outside another one of Mulder’s apartments, pockets jammed with rocks, high gleam of destruction in his eyes.

Mulder’s falling asleep. They woke up nineteen hours ago in different places, long day behind them with a day game and paintball and dinner and bars and now they’re here. Zito’s on this weird track, has been for years now, can’t steer or stop or slow.

“I don’t have any extra blankets,” Mulder tells him foggily.

Zito shrugs. “Whatever. ‘s fine.” He kicks off his sneakers and lies down on the couch, knees bent and his feet against Mulder’s side. Mulder lets them stay like that for a moment, Zito wiggling his toes on Mulder’s ribs, then stands.

Zito watches as Mulder runs his hand through his hair, jackknife light from the hallway pressing dull gold into the angles of his body. The couch is long and soft and Zito could be okay right now, in the silence of the night shore, the cobwebs crowding into the corners of the ceiling.

Mulder leaves the room and Zito turns onto his side, nosing into the cushion. The light flicks off and all Zito can think is that it’s three in the morning and they’re alone here and nothing is going to happen between them, because nothing ever has.

A soft weight crashes down on him, a button clacking into his ear. Zito makes a surprised noise and pushes the sleeve off his face, looks up at Mulder, hovering above the couch and weaving on his feet. Mulder dumps another coat on Zito’s legs, nice gray suit jacket that Zito last saw on him the day he left Triple-A.

“Don’t have any blankets,” Mulder says again, the whites of his eyes sharp in the dark, and Zito’s speechless.

*

A week after Zito had talked Mulder off the float and into the Coastway Diner, they’d seen each other every day and Zito existed in a state of perpetual disbelief.

Mulder was a pitcher, maybe more of a pitcher than anyone Zito had ever met before. He kept his left shoulder taped up all the time, unless he was starting or going swimming, rubbed salve into his elbow and scraped up his fingertips with sandpaper. He came knocking at the door of Zito’s host family, and Zito came tapping on the window of Mulder’s own.

It could have been anything, Mulder under streetlamps with his back plank-straight and fighting the wind, Zito with restaurant peppermints crinkling in his pockets, the alcohol Mulder could buy because he looked about twenty-four years old when he hardened his jaw, the way Zito knew how to sneak into the movie theatre in Chatham.

Zito had never had a friend like this. Mulder made him six times cooler, six times more likely to stumble over what he was trying to say, six times more willing to wake up early in the morning to go for pancakes.

After the game, Mulder was leaning on the parking lot fence, far down the right field line. He’d been there since the seventh inning, and Zito wasn’t sure why Mulder hadn’t come in and found a seat in the stands. Zito had pitched into the ninth, and every time he set himself, his eyes flicked past the first baseman and crashed into Mulder, long figure chopped up by chain-link.

Mulder told him he’d looked good, and took Zito away to his adopted house, up three flights of stairs to the attic. Someone had committed suicide up there four decades ago, hung from the rafters, and Zito was leery, jumping at small noises and the whine of wood under his feet.

They lolled around under the skylight, half-heartedly playing videogames, drinking from unmarked bottles. Zito was exhausted, dragged down in his shoulders and legs.

“Are you going to that thing tonight?” Mulder asked him. “That kid from Atlanta?”

Zito lay down on the short rug, splinters in his hair from the bare wood floor. “You going?” He could hear the game music and under it, dogs barking outside.

Mulder shrugged, sitting on the couch above Zito. Zito was looking up at his sprawled jeaned legs like misplaced pieces of a bridge. “Thinking about it.”

“Maybe I’ll go, then.”

Zito had no intention of being anywhere that night that Mulder wasn’t. They weren’t much alike, but Mulder didn’t seem to mind when Zito laughed at his own jokes and lost his wallet five times a day.

Zito crawled up onto the couch next to Mulder, his foot wound in the videogame controller. The air was moted, tinned gold, stuffed with heat. Zito would put his hand on Mulder’s leg, high above his knee, or his stomach maybe, where Mulder’s shirt got hiked up and his belt buckle pressed a cold slash in the skin, but he was tired. His arm hurt.

“I don’t really like that kid from Atlanta, though,” Zito remarked.

“You’re thinking of someone else.”

“Am I?”

Mulder nodded. He was still playing the game, mercilessly whaling on Zito’s guy even though Zito had given up. “You’re thinking of that blonde guy.”

Zito’s lip sneered. “Hate that blonde guy.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. Mortal enemies. That’s not the Atlanta kid, though.”

Zito was confused, baseball card photographs and half-blackout memories surfacing. Thick Southern accents and sunburned necks, Mulder next to him on the couch and Zito might fall asleep, wake up in time to give Mulder most of the money in his pockets and wait in the car while Mulder bought them liquor. Phase one in the front seat of Mulder’s car that he’d driven out here from Michigan, watching the color rise on Mulder’s face and Mulder’s spine giving out slowly. Best way to spend a night.

“How come you know who I don’t like and I don’t?” Zito asked, not really that interested.

“Because I pay attention, man. Because you are, like, window glass, see-through, it’s nothing.”

Zito scowled. Mulder was talking shit. If he could see through, he would see that Zito wanted to push his jeans off his hips and lick the dents and fissures of Mulder’s body, hold him down with a fist on Mulder’s leg and a fist on his chest. And if Mulder could see that, he would certainly do something about it, he would hit Zito or fuck him or carve his name into Zito’s back, something. But Mulder played so cool all the time.

Mulder grinned at him. Zito was in a bad place, ghosts in the edges of his vision, all obsessed with a brand-new friend, and that never lasted. Mulder lived in fucking Michigan, alien snow-baked terrain in Zito’s mind. One and a half months left here on the coast, then they were done for each other.

But Mulder had dust in his hair and the tag sticking out of the back of his shirt had his name written on it in black ink. Sometimes, Zito felt like whatever the fuck they were doing with each other was enough to slow time and stop the rotation of the earth, motionless right then in the attic room, planning their night.

*

By August, Zito is sick of telling people that it’s not his fault and he can’t be blamed. The American League hasn’t figured him out, but that’s surely in the mail, and meanwhile the Oakland A’s are further above .500 than they’ve been in better than a decade. Zito wears his amnesty on his sleeve, wide-eyed in interviews, just a punk kid rookie and I don’t know nothing.

They go to Seattle and that’s something else, wind and rain, loud clocks in the hotel rooms and Mulder’s hurt. He’s pretending he’s not, rolling his shoulder, twisting his back, going through his delivery in slow-motion in search of mechanical difficulties. Zito starts to see everything in quartered time. Mulder moves two inches a second and Zito misjudges the speed of taxis sheering towards him.

He sits in the hallway outside the trainer’s room, making up new knots with his own shoelaces. He can hear Mulder inside, answering in fragments, can imagine him shrugging the way he does when he’s talking to the press.

Mulder says his arm’s a little tight, of course it’s sore, he pitched two fucking days ago, was it supposed to be something other than sore? Mulder gets angry in a build, his forehead goes taut and then his mouth and then his neck, and if you’re not paying attention, you might not see it until it’s too late. His voice is the last thing, it’s all downhill from there.

The door swings open and Zito’s caught off-guard. Mulder is buttoning up his shirt and sneering. Life is an awful joke when he can’t locate.

“Get the fuck off the ground, c’mon.”

Zito takes off his shoes rather than untying them, lets Mulder lead him down the hall and back to the clubhouse, where they grab their bags and vacate the building. Soaked concrete and Zito’s socks are ruined, his shoes slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

“Nice night,” he remarks.

Mulder glowers at him. “I’m gonna need like four beers before I find you amusing.”

Zito nods, willing to accept that, not telling Mulder that he missed a button at the place where his ribs meet his stomach. “’Kay.”

It only takes Mulder two beers, though, which Zito thinks he can count as a victory. Mulder’s shoulders come down and the lines around his mouth disappear. His upper lip shines, licked clean, and in the length of the day, Zito has wondered maybe a million times where the damage is in Mulder, his arm or his head.

But Mulder’s okay now, laughing and calling the waitress sweetheart and kicking Zito under the table. He’s forgotten the game two days ago, the six runs and the way the plate danced away from him. It’s not right, watching Mulder struggle, dirt in his mouth and sunflower salt under his nails. Zito’s living in some fucked-up fantasy world, pitching better than Mulder like the moon has turned red, other impossible things.

It’s not yet past curfew, and Zito drags Mulder back to the hotel, through the rain. Slipping on the waxy marble floor of the lobby, Zito’s snapped shoelaces trail behind him and Mulder is muttering against the side of Zito’s head, arm heavy on Zito’s shoulder. Zito props him against the wall of the elevator and steps away, shivering and smiling.

“You’re such a fucking mess, man.”

Mulder rolls his eyes, squeaking his wet fingers on the brass rail. “It’s your fault, anyway.”

“Sure, sure, blame me for everything. That’s great.”

Mulder leaves slim translucent fingerprints on everything he touches. Zito helps him locate his room and hangs around as Mulder changes into dry clothes, hanging his jeans neatly over the shower rod. Zito is trying to work out how he can smuggle himself into the left side of Mulder’s bed without Mulder noticing.

Mulder collapses. Zito hovers above him, runed plane of Mulder’s back, push of one shoulder blade higher than the other.

“You gonna be okay?” he asks idiotically.

Mulder turns his face to the side, single blue eye half-closed and half-focused on Zito. “Did good, went out and got me drunk. Did right by me.”

“Yeah?”

Smiling, Mulder noses into the pillow again. “Now I only gotta worry about the fuckin’ room. Fuckin’ spinny room.”

Zito laughs. “All right then. Night, dude.”

But he’s not leaving because he’s not drunk enough to leave, or too drunk, really fucked up right about now with Mulder face-down on the bed and his arm badly twisted under him, big hand curled and sticking out.

“Hey,” Zito says, throat dried up. He lays his hand on Mulder’s wrist and tells him softly, “C’mon, man, roll over, you can’t sleep like that.”

Zito tugs and Mulder moves without resistance, smooth onto his back and his eyes are closed. He’s smiling still and Zito’s not beyond anything, never had any fucking will power and can’t take no for an answer. He leans down and kisses Mulder, not the first time but maybe Zito will be able to count this one, if Mulder looks him in the eye tomorrow, if Mulder kisses him back but doesn’t stop this time.

Mulder makes a high surprised noise and tips his head to the side and Zito changes his angle, holding onto Mulder’s wrist. Mulder goes loose beneath him and his lips part and he sorta breathes into Zito. Scuffed left hand alights on Zito’s neck and Mulder kisses him so hard, like Zito’s a cure for all the things Mulder can’t do anymore.

Unable to believe it, Zito puts his hand on Mulder’s hip, shifting slowly onto Mulder’s body. Mulder stretches, making room for him. Zito has been saving a place for this inside himself for so long that the absence has become a tangible part of him, as real and familiar as his birthmark, and for a hysterical moment, he’s heartbroken at the loss.

*

At the end of the summer, there was a bonfire at the beach and the whole world was there. Driftwood was dragged through the sand and arranged in a lopsided circle around the fire, and the boys of the Cape Cod Baseball League sat with beers and joints, watched the smoke stagger into the black sky. Zito’s lungs hurt from breathing it in.

He was the center of everything, though, the moon a milky thumbprint in the sky and crowds of people drifting to and from him like a tide. The sand crawled into his sneakers; he wasn’t wearing socks and he wasn’t wearing a shirt and the ocean was almost overpowering.

Zito’s handwriting had changed over the course of the summer, along with his speech patterns and command with a full count. Everyone was a grown-up Little Leaguer, calling his name and Zito was just looking for Mulder.

They were leaving tomorrow. Sunlight the color and consistency of oil awaited them both on the other side of tonight, buses and airports and planes, splitting apart from each other on separate flight paths somewhere over Ohio. People were dying from the heat in Chicago and Zito was baselessly worried, Mulder so skinny, so vulnerable to shifts in temperature.

Zito found him far down the beach. The bonfire was match-light, the laughs and shouts of the kids tinny and echoed. Mulder had his feet in the sand and Zito fell down next to him with a forty and weird promises that he meant to keep echoing in his mind.

“Dude.”

Mulder kinda smiled. His profile was indistinct, hard to figure.

“The fuck are you, like, man. Way out here, what are you doing?” Zito counted his fingers quickly. He was drunk.

Mulder shrugged. “Tired, you know? Too much going on back there.”

“It’s a party.”

“Thanks. Lemme have some of that.”

Zito handed him the forty. Mulder took a long drink and the starlight, moonlight, firelight, shone off the glass and touched gold on his neck. Zito settled in, digging his hands into the sand.

They traded the bottle back and forth, talking about simple stuff. Would you rather be attacked by a shark or a lion? Would you rather die of thirst or starvation? Would you trade baseball for the ability to fly? Zito could feel the night draining down and away, the summer with it, Mulder right there on the beach near where a piece of sand had been fused into black glass.

Sunrise was four hours away. Zito was weaving, losing his train of thought and Mulder said things that flickered through him and were immediately forgotten.

He shifted, placing his shoulder neatly against Mulder’s. “Be strange, going back to school like this.”

“Like. Like what?” Mulder was drunk too, talking very carefully.

Zito showed the world with his hand, the empty bottle sparkling. “I was here and I know everything. Get back, it’s just another fucking summer. Oh, I was in Massachusetts. I played in the Cape League. I, I. I got wasted on a beach with Mark and that’s all.”

Mulder started to laugh. His shoulders curved up and in, bony knobs of his spine pressing up under his T-shirt, in the column of sweat that had formed. He touched his forehead to his knees, air whistling between his teeth.

“That’s, god, that’s all? Drunk on a beach with me, and that’s your summer?” Mulder lifted his face, grinning.

Zito hooked a finger in the back of Mulder’s shirt, roughing his knuckle on the high break where his back met his neck. Not his whole summer, just the part that counted. What he’d remember when he thought about nineteen years old, when he saw a bonfire on the beach, when he tasted malt liquor.

“And, what?” Zito asked. “You’ll go back to East Lansing. I’ll go back to L.A. You’re a fucking dream I had once. Never see you again.”

Mulder quieted, looking out at the water. The back of his hand was canted against Zito’s knee. Zito was closely aware of not wearing a shirt, of Mulder not pulling away from Zito’s hand on his neck.

After a long time, Mulder glanced at him, the edge of his mouth tweaked upwards. “That’s only a best guess. You don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

Zito nodded, tightening his hold, his throat constricting. He kept Mulder still and closed the distance between them, fitting them mouth-to-mouth. It happened quick enough that Mulder couldn’t pull away, and Zito gripped the back of his neck, licked his way into Mulder’s mouth and Mulder kissed him back like it was brand-new.

Five seconds like that, maybe ten, Mulder’s hair sticky with gel and salt spray, Mulder’s long chest warm under Zito’s free hand. Mulder was in it, five seconds, maybe ten, his tongue in Zito’s mouth, his small choked sounds cutting right through. His hand clenched on Zito’s arm, thumbnail driving into the bone of Zito’s elbow.

Five seconds, maybe ten, and Zito was so drunk, blank with joy, and then Mulder pushed him away.

Breathing heavily, hard glitter in his eyes, Mulder shook his head and stuttered something about, no, sorry, not, can’t, Barry, and Zito was motionless, watching Mulder’s lips move without hearing a word.

“It’s okay,” he heard himself saying, seeing the panic rising in Mulder’s face, his hands starting to shake. Zito forced himself to smile. “It’s okay, my fault.”

He drew away from Mulder, setting a length of sand between them. He said again, to make sure Mulder understood: “My fault.”

And Mulder stared at him without blinking, his hands shuddering, spilling fingerprints all over the beach.

*

In the morning, Zito wakes up in the perfect place between dreams when he’s missed nothing, and he brushes his teeth, white light in thin lines through the cracked curtains. It’s early, too early, really, to be up, but he’s up.

Mulder’s still in bed. He’s got torn pieces of foil in his hair and the sheets are thrown back, Mulder’s hand in the dent where Zito’s body used to be.

One month to the day since Zito got him drunk and took advantage. Zito can’t get right, can’t acclimate to Mulder stripped down to skin and asleep in his bed. Fresh-mouthed, slick-toothed, light-wired, Zito turns the TV on, mutes the volume and sits on the floor at the foot of the bed to watch cartoons.

Mulder sprawls out slowly across the whole bed, process of osmosis like he can’t help filling every empty space. His foot nudges Zito’s head, and Zito is half-sleepy, half-happy.

It’s quick when Mulder wakes up, snatch of breath and then the rustle of him sitting up. Zito has seen it happen from six inches away, but Mulder doesn’t like to wake up with Zito watching him, almost blacked Zito’s eye the last time.

“Hey,” Mulder says. Zito waves over his shoulder, feeling nailed to the floor. He can picture Mulder, sheets down to his waist, jammed hair and stiff ears. “Fucking time is it, man?”

“See that thing with the glowing red numbers to your left?”

“God, just asked a simple question.”

Zito grins at nothing in particular. He peeks back, rumpled landscape of the bedcovers, Mulder bleary and attempting to summon a glare. Zito gets up and wants to slide in with Mulder again, wants it kinda terribly like swimming deep enough to pop his ears and looking up for sunlight through the water. But this is all new and so fucking weird. Zito keeps expecting to look out the window and find that the street signs have changed in the night.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Zito offers, and vanishes himself down the hall, breathing easier. They’re closing in on October, feeling like they’ve been lit on fire. Mulder’s hurt most of the time but not saying anything about it.

As he screws around in the kitchen, opening cabinets and rearranging things, he can hear Mulder taking a shower, superspeed as always because he grew up with two brothers and a limited amount of hot water. Zito is sometimes struck in the face with reminders of everything that he knows about Mulder.

The coffee’s ready, Mulder’s wandering in, damp T-shirt and bare feet, and Zito is scared nearly to death, because he’s seen this just shy of a dozen times now and it’s killing him.

“Red mug’s in the dishwasher,” he says without thinking. He takes out cereal and puts some popcorn in the microwave. Mulder calls him a freak, hip-cocked and cradling his coffee with both hands. Zito tells him to shut the fuck up, absently tracking the thud of his pulse in his wrist, pressed down on the counter.

“I figured out who you remind me of, by the way.”

Zito lifts his eyebrows. “Took you three years?”

Shaking his head, Mulder blows across the top of his coffee. “I haven’t known you three years. I’ve known you, like, five months, it’s just been broken up over time.”

“So that’s how it is.” Zito smirks. The popcorn starts to sound in the microwave, slow at first. “Here I’ve been fucking pining away.”

Mulder looks at him in surprise. “Really?”

“Of course not.”

Mulder rolls his eyes, skidding his heel on the tile. Zito took him home last night, curled up in the back of his car, knees against the back windshield. Mulder hadn’t gotten much sleep on the road trip and he was secretly afraid of heights, hated driving over the bridge or even just riding shotgun. He napped with Zito’s surfboard blanket under his head, stumbled out with sand on his face. Zito had torn Mulder’s shirt off him in the front hallway when Mulder was still half-asleep.

“There was this crazy guy, hung out outside the 7-11,” Mulder tells him, taking a seat at the table and talking over the rise of the popcorn. “Always talking about, I don’t know. Missiles and stuff. The sky was falling. There was something dangerous under the street. Like that. Anyway. You remind me of him.”

Zito blinks slowly. “Okay.” Mulder shrugs, like, that’s it, nothing more to see here. The steam from the coffee winds thick in the bars of sunlight through the blinds. Zito gets the popcorn and singes his fingers pulling it open.

Though he made fun, Mulder still steals some of Zito’s popcorn, and Zito gets to see his fingers shine with fake butter and salt. Mulder’s talking about something, unconsciously slipping down in the chair, his feet bumping into Zito’s. Zito picks up on the ends of things: so, like, you know. You remember that, right? Which is why I don’t talk to him anymore.

Mulder smiles on occasion and the wet spots on his shirt are drying up. He asks Zito where they’re going after the game and Zito’s not listening.

“Dude, hey.” Mulder kicks him.

Zito looks up sharply, wounded, and says fast, “The hell are you doing here, Mark?”

Mulder gives him a look, mix of amusement and exasperation. “Having breakfast, you fucking nutcase.”

Shaking his head, Zito kicks him back, sees Mulder suck in a breath between his teeth. “This, like, you and me and, and, you’re spending the night now? Really?”

Mulder half-laughs. “Are you okay?” Zito shakes his head again, staring down at the places where he picked chips of laminate off the table, because Zito’s always been kinda fidgety. “You want me to go or something?”

Zito stands. “No,” he says briefly, and walks out of the room. His head hurts, too much going on inside. For three years, Mulder has been five or ten seconds of the best summer of his life, and now he’s there every time Zito turns around, and Zito’s kissed him drunk and sober and sick with exhaustion, too tired to kiss him back. Zito’s had his hands on every part of him. Mulder’s got a scar on the back of his arm that looks like a shrouded figure; he got it setting off fireworks when he was twelve years old.

Zito thumps down on the couch, thinking that he woke up too fucking early. The season’s been so long; he keeps forgetting that he started out in Sacramento.

He waits for Mulder to pass through on his way to the bedroom, waits for Mulder to get his stuff together and take off, no matter what Zito said. Mulder can deal with a lot because he doesn’t really care, but Zito has tested better patience than this.

Instead, though, Mulder calls from the kitchen, “Where’s the real sugar, man?”

Zito bites on his fingernail and doesn’t answer. Mulder appears, tall in the doorway. “Are you having a breakdown, or what?”

Zito scowls at him. “No.” He’s aware that he’s gone inside his head again, old habit and maybe the worst one he’s got. In pretty much every way that counts, it makes much more sense for Mulder to be a five or ten second misjudgment three years ago than for him to be here in Zito’s apartment at eight in the morning.

“Then what the fuck?” Mulder sighs extravagantly and drops down next to Zito, holding a spoon in one hand and bouncing silvery reflections off the ceiling. His leg rests easily against Zito’s own. Zito eyes it with suspicion.

“You’re here all the time.”

Mulder leans his head against the back of the couch and hums, his eyes closed. “Yeah.”

“And it really hasn’t been three years?”

“God.” Mulder’s hand crawls and latches onto Zito’s shirt, neat nails in Zito’s shoulder. Zito tastes blood, lets himself get tugged closer. “I’m here. It doesn’t fucking matter how long it’s been.”

Mulder’s legs fold over Zito’s lap. He pushes his hand into Zito’s hair and leaves it there. Mulder exhales and they’re motionless for a long time, and then Mulder’s asleep again, spoon sliding out of his free hand to tumble to the floor. Zito can lean into him without fear. Zito stays watchful, Mulder’s thumb twitching on his ear.

Zito can believe this, for now at least. One thing at a time, and all he really has to do is keep waking up with Mulder nearby, days stacking up and eventually it’ll be a lifelong kinda thing.

*

*

*

2002

Zito’s waiting for him on the sidewalk.

Mulder keeps it in his head, sitting on the floor of Eric Chavez’s hotel room, dressed for the bar but not moving. Chavez is in the bathroom, fighting with his wife on the phone. Mulder rests his head back against the wall and pictures Zito down there in the street.

Chavez’s voice rises, “You said you’d let that go!”

This has been going on for months. Chavez doesn’t sleep and doesn’t talk much, finds quiet corners and small rooms. The draw of his mouth looks painful, his shoulders like felled trees. Every throw he makes to first bounces.

“Well, I really don’t know what the fuck you want me to do about it, babe. It isn’t just a fucking _job_.” Chavez’s voice is giving out, rasped at the edges.

Zito, on the sidewalk, wearing a new silk shirt and his high school jacket. Zito in the streetlight, leaning on the wall and watching the people go by.

Mulder gets out his phone and calls him.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?”

Mulder glances at the shut door of the bathroom, the strip of light underneath like a highway line. “Still upstairs.”

Zito breathes into the phone, one of his less-than-stellar habits. “How much longer, do you think?”

Zito knows what’s going on. The whole team does. At some point, Mulder was tapped to take care of Eric Chavez, though he doesn’t remember anybody ever asking him if he wanted the responsibility.

“Don’t know. Sounds pretty bad.”

“Should we go without him?”

Something shatters in the bathroom, and Mulder stands. “Hang on, he’s, he’s hurt or something. Call you back.”

He faintly hears Zito saying “’kay” as he closes his phone.

Mulder raps on the bathroom door. “Chavvy? Dude, are you okay?”

Silence from inside, thick as the air and Mulder wonders for a moment what city they’re in. He pushes open the door, finds Chavez on the tile with his back against the bathtub, broken mirror glass surrounding him, his phone crumpled like a soda can in the sink.

Chavez looks up at him with dry, baleful eyes, puffy underneath. “I fucking _hate_ her,” he spits.

Mulder nods, stepping carefully through the glass as it crunches and squeals. “Yeah.” He pulls Chavez up by the elbow, Chavez trembling with anger, the necklace he wears fallen out of his shirt, chain tangled and the cross resting on his shoulder.

He takes Chavez through the connecting door to his room, pushes him into the bathroom. “Wash your face. Zito’s waiting.”

Chavez gives him a dark look. “Oh, well, if fucking _Zito’s_ fucking _waiting_ , guess I better hop to, huh?”

“Just wash your face, Eric,” Mulder says tiredly. He leaves the door open and steps out into the bedroom, staring at the watercolor on the wall without really seeing it. He calls Zito back.

“You okay?”

Mulder runs his hand through his hair. “Yeah.”

“Chavvy?”

“Not so much.”

Zito sighs heavily. Mulder can see him with his eyebrows pulled down, pretty-boy face all tied up. Mulder wishes Zito was up here with him. Zito has a tendency of making stupid things easier to deal with.

“This fucking sucks, Mark.”

“Yeah.” Mulder leans to check on Chavez, who’s scrubbing fiercely at his face with a wet washcloth, bent over the sink with his shirt tugged up and a pencil-line of white briefs showing over his jeans and belt. “We’re coming down. Get a cab.”

Zito grins when he sees Chavez, like he has no idea, like he doesn’t see the minute cuts in Chavez’s knuckles. He puts his arm around Chavez’s shoulder and chatters away, willfully ignorant of Chavez’s locked-down face. They’re friends. This is how friends deal with each other when one of them is disintegrating.

Mulder watches Zito carefully, an old habit of his own.

They meet the other guys and Mulder recognizes the skyline and the humidity, the dent in the side of the TV over the bar. They’re in Tampa Bay. Mulder thinks he might have fucked Zito in the bathroom here last year.

Chavez burrows right into the back of the booth, glaring at everyone. They stay away, except for Zito, who sits right next to him and keeps getting him fresh beers, and Mulder, who sits next to Zito and leaves one hand on Zito’s knee under the table. It’s a fixed point.

Chavez gets drunk and the tension rides out of him. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he has a wife, much less that he’s losing her. He caws laughter, bangs on the table with his fist. He says, “Shut the fuck up,” every few minutes, even when no one’s talking.

Zito’s eyes follow Chavez up to the bar and then turn to Mulder. Mulder holds his breath for a second, biting the inside of his lip.

“Well,” Zito says, and pushes at Mulder’s knee with his own.

“Well,” Mulder agrees, and slides his hand up Zito’s leg a little. Zito smiles in a way that he probably shouldn’t when they’re in public.

The night goes like that and some of their teammates ask Mulder quietly if Chavez is okay, but he only shrugs. He can’t really tell. He’s never seen Chavez anything but cool and happy, so this new development is catching him off guard.

They have to carry their third baseman back to the hotel, the toes of his sneakers dragging on the sidewalk and his head rolling forward.

Later, in the whir of the air conditioning and crowd of the stars against the window, Zito sneaks into Mulder’s room, whispering, “hey,” and taking off his shirt. Mulder kicks the covers off the bed and forgets for awhile about all other things.

*

2000

In the off-season after their rookie year, Mulder wasn’t sure what Zito wanted to do. He didn’t bother asking; things had a way of working themselves out.

Zito came over to help him pack after they got back from New York, when Mulder was still stiff and finding his hands increasingly untrustworthy, not in the mood to talk about anything. Zito obliged him, folding T-shirts and separating white socks from dress.

When the posters were down off the walls and the boxes were taped up and the bedside table was on the sidewalk with a handwritten ‘FREE’ sign tacked to it, Mulder came back upstairs to find Zito lying on the floor, his jacket balled up under his head.

Liquor and dry cereal were all that was left in the kitchen, glasses and bowls packed away. Mulder’s flight to Chicago was in the morning, at an hour ungodly enough that he probably wouldn’t even bother going to sleep. Zito was driving to Hollywood at the end of the week.

He sat down near Zito’s shoulder, bite of whiskey, crunch of Kix. There wasn’t enough in the bottle to get both of them drunk.

“What are you gonna do over the winter?” Zito asked him, breaking the silence after seven hours.

Mulder slanted a look at him, Zito’s hair crinkled on his forehead, four-days unwashed because they’d had a postseason to lose and it was more important than showering.

“Not too much, I guess.”

Zito showed his teeth. His face was unlined in an almost eerie way. “It’ll be cold there, right?”

“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Are there, like, places where you can go? To train and stuff?”

Mulder balanced the bottle on Zito’s chest, watching the liquid roll with every breath. “Northwestern. My brother goes there, he can get me into their team’s facilities.”

“That’s good.” Zito was almost a still-life like this, the bottle on his chest, his hands motionless at his sides. “Maybe I’ll come to see you.”

Mulder twisted a finger in Zito’s shirt and tugged a little, making the bottle rock uneasily.

“If you want.”

Zito looked up at him and Mulder couldn’t read his expression. Mulder hardly ever could, which was strange, because Zito seemed so very surface, when he was talking, when he was moving, when he was pitching. But when he went still, his face was like sand.

“Mark-”

“Are you staying tonight?” Mulder cut him off.

Zito grabbed the bottle and sat up. He glanced at the door and a piece of lank hair fell in front of his eye. The apartment was abandoned and very quiet, depressions in the carpet from where the furniture had been, pale scars in the paint of the wall from Sticky-Tac and Scotch tape.

“I think this place is haunted,” Zito said thoughtfully. “I’ll stay.”

He took a long drink, and Mulder turned his eyes away.

Mulder hadn’t told him about the space of years between when Zito had kissed him on the beach in Cape Cod and when they found themselves rookies on the same major league team. He knew Zito didn’t understand what had changed, why it was okay when they were twenty-two and had the world to lose, if it hadn’t been when they were nineteen and shiftless.

Mulder wasn’t inclined to explain things to him. Sometimes stuff just happened, and giving Zito more information to obsess over was never a good idea.

Their season was over. It was hard to get used to.

“Here,” Zito pushed the bottle into his hand. “Finish that.” He toed off his sneakers, his socks, snaked his belt out of its loops and tossed everything at the wall.

“Dude,” Mulder said in vague protest.

Zito shot him a glare. “I’m not messing up your place. There isn’t even anything in your place to mess up. So shut it.”

Mulder hooked a hand in Zito’s shirt and kissed him once, hard as always because that was the best way. He felt all fucked up and melted on the inside.

Zito blinked at him, his mouth wet. “Um.”

“Yeah,” Mulder sighed, and got to his feet. He paced the length of the room, scuff of his feet on the carpet and Zito’s lidded gaze tracking him, Zito already half turned on and showing it in the grip of his hands on his ankles, the flash of teeth going to his lower lip.

Mulder stopped at the window, looking down on the street. “Next year I’m gonna live somewhere with a better view than this.”

Angling his head to the side, Zito ghosted a smile. “When I come over here, I look for you in the window, like, force of habit, you know? Like you’ll be watching, but you never are.”

Mulder rested his shoulder against the window frame. His shoulder hurt, dully aware in a downward part of him that he should be pretty angry at Zito, for stealing his spot in the rotation, for pitching in Yankee Stadium four days ago. But Zito was on his feet, next to Mulder all of a sudden like magic.

He put his hand on Mulder’s back and pressed his mouth to Mulder’s shoulder blade, small furnace through Mulder’s shirt. “Can we do this again next year?” he wanted to know, his voice muffled and low.

Mulder leaned back into him, closing his eyes. Zito didn’t get that not everything was complicated; he always needed so many words.

“You’re gonna come see me in Chicago?” Mulder asked, and felt Zito smile against the back of his neck.

*

Zito lives in Pacific Heights this year, in three rooms that are small enough to make Mulder feel cartoonishly huge. His front windows take up most of the wall and look out on the Marina, the Golden Gate Bridge, the tumble of houses down the hill. The first morning Mulder woke up there, he carried the kitchen table across the room and set it down right there with a view of the whole world.

Zito’s asleep at the table now, his head pillowed in his arms. Mulder barely got him upstairs, Zito gibbering against his throat, clinging tight to Mulder’s waist. They were supposed to eat first, wash three cities off their bodies, then sleep, but Zito had always been on a weird schedule. He’d fallen asleep almost before he got all the way into the chair.

Mulder finds some leftover Chinese in the refrigerator, flat Coke from a two-liter bottle, and the long trip has disrupted his perception of things, bled the Marina lights, cut the bridge into paper fans.

It’s been almost two years since Zito crash-landed back in Mulder’s life for good. Mulder doesn’t count their two weeks in Vancouver in 1999 or three weeks in Sacramento at the turn of the century, because he’d only had time to get accustomed to Zito’s proximity again, not do anything about it.

Mulder didn’t recognize that his rookie season had gone as badly as it had until it was over, until he was back in Chicago, learning his numbers in disbelief. But Mulder’s never been that focused on numbers, anyway.

Zito murmurs and rubs his cheek on his arm. Mulder, looking down at him, has a partial view of one closed eye, sketched eyebrow, artfully tousled hair, still, always. Zito’s clean forehead like he’ll never age, like even time is in love with him.

Mulder gives him a few more minutes to be dissolute and ungoverned, asleep at the kitchen table like a kid, and then he pulls on Zito’s hair.

“Wake up, hey.”

Zito pushes his mouth into his arm, mumbles, “Don’ fuck with m’hair.”

Mulder tugs him a good one for that, and Zito’s eyes open, sleepily glower at him. Mulder wants to grin like an asshole, but he only pets Zito a little bit and tells him, “Eat. Then sleep. Remember?”

Propping himself up on an elbow, Zito nods grudgingly, yawning big enough that Mulder can see a silver spark of his fillings. He finishes off the Chinese and licks sticky dried Coke off the side of Mulder’s wrist. Everything’s like sleepwalking, like Mulder could pick him up and put him into the wall and Zito would just smile down at him.

Two years, and the very long time it took Zito to calm the fuck down. Two years of eating dinner at three in the morning after road trips, waking Zito up in weird places, feeling Zito’s tongue in the dent between the bones of his arm. Two years in baseball time is longer than anything that has ever happened to Mulder before.

Mulder gets him to take a shower and that wakes him up a little bit, his eyes opening more than halfway for the first time since they got off the plane. Zito’s damp, warm and red-skinned, kissing Mulder against the towel rack, hands locked on the bar to keep him in place. Mulder’s fingers go skating over Zito’s back.

Mulder pushes him away, a stupid half-grin on his face. “Okay, okay. Go.” Zito grins back, disappears into the bedroom.

He’s brushing his teeth and looking forward to a number of things, when his phone starts trilling in the next room.

“Phone’s ringing!” Zito calls.

Mulder spits, catches sight of himself rolling his eyes in the mirror. “You’re, like, twice as helpful as a normal person, you know that?” he says as he follows the sound, trying to remember where he put his jacket.

“Special talent,” Zito answers, mid-yawn. Mulder doesn’t have much time. The next time Zito falls asleep, it’ll be for good. He considers leaving the phone to catch a missed call, but that’ll just be a distraction.

It’s Chavez, glowing on the green screen, and a curl of disappointment makes itself known in Mulder’s stomach.

“Hello?”

“She threw me out,” Chavez says without preamble. “Fucking _threw me out_.” His voice is harsh, wind noise rushing behind him.

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m fucking serious!” Chavez screams, and Mulder winces, takes the phone away from his ear. Zito’s watching him from the bed, dark eyes and everything good in the world. “I’m coming over to your place, okay? _Jesus_. I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Whoa, hang on, you’re, you can’t come to my place.” Mulder’s mind is flashing, Chavez is about to wrap his car around a tree and they can’t win without him, no matter how good Mulder pitches, or Zito. “Calm down for a second.”

“Fuck you. Where the fuck else am I supposed to go?” Mulder can hear him pounding his fist on the steering wheel.

“Chavvy, would you just. C’mon. Don’t get all crazy.”

“I don’t really have much of a choice. The fuck is the matter with you?”

Mulder presses his fingers into his eye. “I’m not there. I’m in the city.”

Chavez barely pauses. “Tell Zito you’ll have to fuck him later and get back here or I’ll break a window, swear to god I will.” He hangs up, rough scramble of static and then nothing.

Taking a breath, Mulder looks over at Zito, who matches him evenly, odd resignation in his face. “I’ve got to go.”

“Gathered that.” Zito’s eyes glitter and he stretches slowly, pull and arch of the muscles in his chest and stomach. Mulder glares at him, dragging his jeans back on.

“And I coulda done without that, too, thanks.”

Zito shrugs, entirely unrepentant. “You’ve just ruined my night.”

“Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He doesn’t kiss Zito goodbye, because they don’t do that, but he does look over his shoulder as he leaves, imagining in the bedside light that he can see Zito’s skin cooling and paling.

Chavez knows because during spring training, two months ago, he’d seen Mulder and Zito falling out of a steamed-up car together, Zito’s shirt buttoned up wrong, Mulder’s lip swelling. Zito had freaked because he thought Mulder would freak, but it had all been sorted in the end.

Maybe that’s why this is his job now, Mulder considers as he vanishes into the tunnel of the bridge. Because Chavez holds a secret of his and it’s only fair for it to go both ways.

*

They didn’t see each other again until after Thanksgiving.

Mulder learned quickly that he wasn’t any good on the phone with Zito, or Zito wasn’t good with him, either way. There were awkward silences and cleared throats up until Halloween, and then they gave up on that. Two weeks of nothing, then Zito sent a long and misspelled email with the subject line: ‘I am durnk.’

That was better. Zito went on tangents in emails that he usually forestalled saying out loud, likely enjoying the fact that no one was giving him shut-up-for-one-goddamn-second looks. Mulder found out that the attic in Cape Cod had reminded Zito of horror movies he’d seen when he was a kid, and that’s why he’d never liked being up there after dark. He found out that Zito had slept with six girls and four guys, and Mulder was the only one he’d had sex with in different cities, which apparently meant something to Zito. He found out that Zito had thrown rocks through the windows of Mulder’s Sacramento apartment because Mulder wasn’t in them.

Mulder replied back to every one, checked his inbox first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do. He couldn’t talk like Zito did, couldn’t write like it either, didn’t really want to, because Zito left so much showing. Self-preservation was unknown to him. Mulder erased the emails after he answered them.

At the end of November, then, Mulder got an email saying that Zito was coming to Chicago. He wrote back, ‘when?’ and was still waiting for a reply when Zito knocked on his door.

Zito looked worn down, artificially blurring with energy though his eyes were heavy and low, his shirt ripped along his ribs. He had a bag with him and he grinned when he saw Mulder, his shoulders falling.

“Hello,” Zito said.

Mulder shook his head and took the bag from Zito, led him through the house and into the kitchen. He made sandwiches and wouldn’t let Zito drink anything with caffeine in it, seeing how his throat twitched and the skin on the undersides of his wrists shuddered.

“You might’ve called.”

Zito’s brow furrowed. “It’s a bad time? You’ve got, like. Other things going on. I can go. It’s okay.”

He was half-standing, and Mulder put a hand on his shoulder, shoved him back down into the chair. “Didn’t say that. I just said, you should have called.”

Zito sat back, studying him warily. “I have a hard time keeping track of details.”

“I’ve noticed that.” Mulder kinda smiled, the tension in his back and the phantom pain in his shoulder gone. He was using the off-season as an analgesic, which only worked a little bit. Zito was a breathing reminder of the team, but it didn’t hurt like everything else did.

Zito tapped his fingers on the table. The crusts from his sandwiches made brackets on his plate. “So. Is everything okay?”

Mulder shrugged, got them both a 7-Up. He stayed standing, liking the downward view of Zito, the way Zito’s gaze scraped up his body. “It’s the off-season. It’s as good as can be expected.”

“You don’t say much, in your emails.”

“Well, you balance that out nicely, don’t you think?”

Zito flashed a grin. “Sorry.” Mulder waved his hand dismissively. “What have you been doing?”

Shrugging again, Mulder answered, “I wake up, I go for a run. I go to the college and work out for a little while. See my brother, sometimes we go out to the bars. Watch a lot of TV. Read your emails. You know.”

Zito nodded, his fine mouth carefully set. Mulder wanted to touch him something awful, push his hands under Zito’s shirt, bend him over the table. It’d been a slow night and a slow winter, not even half-over yet.

“Have you noticed, does it seem like this is worse than the off-season last year?” Zito asked.

Mulder thought about that, coming home from Vancouver in September and sleeping in his childhood bed again, his feet hanging off the end. Last year, all he’d been able to think about was that next year he’d make the big leagues, break in during spring training or break in soon thereafter, and he tried to make the winter months fly, out every night, running every day. It hadn’t worked, counting days never did.

Then again, last year he didn’t have his failed rookie season hanging over him like a bad omen.

“I guess it’s about the same,” he told Zito.

Zito’s face wrenched, looking down at his soda. “Sick of it. December’s gonna kill me.”

Mulder scoffed, about to call him melodramatic, but Zito shot him a black look and he kept his mouth shut.

“Anyway,” Zito said. “Thanks for the sandwich.” He took his plate to the sink to wash it off, bumping elbows with Mulder. “You want to go out or something?”

Mulder closed his hand on Zito’s belt and jerked him closer, the plate crashing into the sink, Zito’s face wide-open and surprised.

“No,” Mulder answered, and licked Zito’s ear. Zito shivered, one wet hand sliding up Mulder’s arm and under his shirtsleeve. Zito turned his head and Mulder opened Zito’s mouth with his tongue, jackrabbit thoughts in his mind. Citrus-clean and overly sweet from the soda, Zito put his other hand on the back of Mulder’s head and angled him nearer.

His mind went fuzzy like being up for thirty hours. He tugged Zito’s shirt up and Zito lifted his arms, let Mulder strip it off him. Mulder caught a grin under the fabric, Zito’s hair wild and highlit blonde.

“I didn’t call,” Zito said against his mouth, his hands busy undoing Mulder’s belt, his breath so hot that Mulder couldn’t believe in snow anymore. “Because you might have told me not to come. Fuck. It might have been a. A bad idea.”

Mulder sucked a bruise under his jaw, raked his teeth and Zito’s chest vibrated as he moaned. Zito pressed the back of his hand into Mulder’s jeans, strange bumpy feel of knuckles and no fingertips through his shorts.

“Still fucking stupid,” he muttered, kissing Zito on the mouth again. “Kept me _waiting_.”

“Oh Jesus Christ, Mark,” Zito said, half exasperated and half joyful. Zito grabbed Mulder by the shoulder and held him still, Zito’s face buried in Mulder’s neck, his other hand pushing Mulder’s jeans off his hips. “You never said anything.”

Mulder gritted his teeth, banged his head on the cabinets. “Fucking saying it now, would you please-”

Zito didn’t let him finish, fell to his knees and Mulder couldn’t see him then, Zito’s hair hiding his face and Mulder’s eyes were squeezed shut anyway, it didn’t make a difference.

*

Chavez is still on the couch when Mulder gets up in the morning, but he’s not asleep, blank eyes staring at the dead television. He’d turned down the blanket Mulder offered, shivering now in his T-shirt and bare feet, creases from the couch fabric on his cheek.

Mulder makes some coffee and wonders if he has time to go over the city before they have to be at the ballpark. He wonders if he should just make Chavez an extra key.

He listens to the dogs barking in the neighbor’s yard and the airplanes passing overhead. He can see already that the day will be perfect blue and as still as glass, a baseball-playing day if ever there was one.

Chavez comes in when Mulder’s settled at the table, reading the paper and eating a cold Pop-Tart. He gets himself a cup of coffee and sits across from Mulder, tracing his finger around the grain of the wood.

“Sorry about last night,” Chavez says tonelessly, then winces. “Sorry about the whole thing, really.”

Mulder tears the corner of the paper off, rolling it into a little ball between his finger and thumb. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No.” Chavez shakes his head. His face is painfully tight, his shoulders drawn up near his ears, ruffled black hair and brown shadows under his eyes. He doesn’t look up, staring at the tabletop. “I’ve been a jerk.”

“You’ve got reason, Eric, okay? It’s no big deal.” Mulder sighs inwardly, wishing people would just let stuff be, once in a while, stop trying to talk it out of existence.

Chavez takes a sip of coffee, his eyes squinting as he burns his tongue. “I might have to stay for a little while,” he almost whispers. Mulder figures that the reason that Chavez isn’t looking at him is that he’s on the edge of tears, which makes Mulder extremely uncomfortable.

“Whatever you need, man.” Just don’t cry.

Smiling uneasily at the table, Chavez shakes his head again, the strict red indentation lines running parallel to his cheekbones making him look bizarrely warrior-like.

“Is she allowed to keep me out of the house, do you think?” Chavez asks, sounding totally lost. “I mean, I paid for it.”

Mulder gets up to put some more milk in his coffee, hopefully give Chavez a chance to pull himself together while Mulder’s back is turned.

“I guess, if you want to go that far, like, lawyers or cops or whatever, then it’s your house and she’ll have to leave.”

“But I don’t want her to leave.”

Mulder shuts his eyes briefly, thinking about how much better his morning would be if he’d gotten to stay at Zito’s place last night.

“You also don’t want to sleep on my couch for the rest of the season,” he points out.

He turns back, leaning on the counter, a default position of his for years, since standing, he was taller than most everyone else on the planet. Chavez is looking at him now, bad wounded expression, dirty hair on his forehead.

“Are you even gonna ask what happened?”

Mulder crosses his arms over his chest. “Did you want me to?”

“Well, Christ, Mulder, it’s kinda standard when someone calls you at two in the morning needing to crash at your house.”

“I’m sorry, was it something different than the usual shit between you and her?” Mulder says without thinking, and Chavez flinches hard, his head snagging to the side. Mulder sighs. “Sorry,” he mutters.

Chavez weaves his fingers together, taking a deep breath. It’s all way too emotional for Mulder, who might otherwise be getting blown by Zito right now. He kinda hates his life at the moment.

“She’s just,” Chavez starts, then stops, doesn’t say anything for a minute. Mulder stays quiet. “She knows what it’s like. On the road. Away. That I can’t, can’t be held responsible, because sometimes it just happens, you know? It’s not that I don’t love her. That’s supposed to be the important thing.”

Mulder nods, the usual shit, brought to boil by the pressure of years. Chavez puts his elbows on the table and rests his forehead on his folded hands. Mulder doesn’t have anything to tell him, no advice, no warnings. Mulder does his very best not to get involved in things.

“I think she’s gonna leave me, though,” Chavez says, putting clear effort into sounding matter-of-fact. He looks at Mulder expectantly.

“Well,” Mulder replies, and stares at the floor.

Chavez exhales heavily, and nobody speaks for a little while. Mulder is beginning to relax, thinking that soon they’ll turn to neutral territory, something about the team or the weather or, god, anything, when Chavez says:

“You and Zito.”

Mulder’s muscles go still under his skin. He raises his head, meeting Chavez’s gaze evenly.

“Yeah?”

Chavez narrows his eyes, heartbreak and exhaustion bent in the corners of his mouth. He’s known, seen Zito freaking out in the parking lot in Phoenix and swearing that it wasn’t what it looked like, until Mulder cuffed him upside the head and asked Chavez with forced steel in his voice, is this gonna be a problem? Chavez has known, he’d said it wouldn’t be, whatever, man, do what you want. He’s been true to his word.

“You’ve been. You know. For awhile?”

Mulder moves his shoulders and focuses on the wall to the left of Chavez’s head, scratched-off plaster. “Couple of years.”

He has no intention of explaining the whole mess to Chavez. Not what happened in Cape Cod and not the years in between when Mulder had looked at guys sometimes just to see what it might do to him, if he could recover the feeling of being bonfire-lit, drunk on a beach with his most recent best friend beside him. Not the several times he’d done more than just look, clumsy pushing exchanges in small dorm rooms, wide mouths and hair that wasn’t quite long enough under his fingers. Not the way Zito had smiled in Vancouver and fallen against him in Sacramento and rolled him over in Oakland. Not the way Zito asked too many questions and didn’t care when Mulder couldn’t really answer, and not the ruin in Mulder’s chest when he spotted Zito at the end of the hall.

It’s not the kind of thing you tell other people.

Chavez looks down into the steam rising from his coffee. “You’re with him all the time, though,” he says, ticking his fingers out one at a time. “How do you. How can you stand being with someone so much?”

“I don’t really think about it.” That, Mulder realizes in something like astonishment, is the truth.

Chavez shakes his head slowly. “I don’t get that.”

“It’s not exactly your concern, Chavvy.”

Chavez darts his eyes up and then away again, staring out the window at the trees and the holey wood fence. “It must be easier,” he says almost absently. “Because he’s a guy.”

Mulder half-laughs, caught out in surprise. “Yeah, no fucking worries there.”

“But he couldn’t do anything to hurt you that you couldn’t do back,” Chavez argues.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And I, why are you even asking me about this stuff?”

“What?” Chavez cuts in sharply, his black eyes flashing. “My wife never wants to see me again. I can’t make fucking conversation?”

Mulder shakes his head, turns away. He goes into the living room and drops onto the couch, rubbing his face. He misses living down by the water, near downtown with the ambulances howling and the crazy people shouting at nothing. So quiet out here, cupped by the hills and shielded by trees.

His fingers itch. Chavez’s chair screeches on the linoleum and a moment later, he’s in the doorway, shorter than Zito and broader in the shoulders, the muscles in his arms more defined, dark all the time and not just at certain angles.

“I’m trying to figure out how this happened,” Chavez tells him, digging his hands into his pockets. Mulder’s surrounded by the warmth left by Chavez’s body.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it. Neither did Zito, so you can just leave us out of it, okay?” Mulder scratches at the armrest, not looking back.

“It just makes no sense.” Chavez’s hands fist, his pockets bulging. “This is all so twisted. So fucking stupid.”

Mulder twitches, the words familiar but he can’t place them. He’s done with this, more drama than he needs in one morning. He finds his shoes on the far side of the couch and pulls them on, rough without socks. Rising, he sees panic slice across Chavez’s face briefly.

“You’re leaving?” he asks with his voice weak.

“Look, here.” Mulder detaches his car key from the ring and hands the rest to Chavez, touching for a moment the callused heel of Chavez’s hand, different from Zito because Zito doesn’t take at-bats. “You can stay as long as you need to.”

Chavez nods, his jaw moving carefully. Mulder hesitates, but he doesn’t know what to say. He ducks his head and gets his jacket, halfway out the door when Chavez says, “Thanks, Mark,” so soft Mulder’s pretty sure it was a hallucination.

He flies, breaks records and ends up at Zito’s high apartment, leaning wearily on the door. Zito catches him, sets him upright, hands steady on Mulder’s hips. Mulder lets Zito take him inside without pause, without second thought.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Zito whispers, not at all surprised to see him, something unreadable snaking along the underside of the old joke. He lays his fingertips on the line of Mulder’s jaw. Mulder smiles, rests his forehead on Zito’s cheek.

*

Zito stayed with him in Chicago for three weeks. Mulder thought that Zito had obligations back in Hollywood, his phone blinking with missed calls and voicemails, his watch still on California time. Zito didn’t seem to care, though, so Mulder didn’t either.

Well-secured packages arrived from the West Coast, Zito’s CDs and favorite blanket, two extra pairs of jeans, books and a flashlight, until Mulder didn’t recognize half the things in his house. He made fun of Zito for not being able to travel light. He got bored one afternoon and took apart Zito’s clock radio, dismantled it like a bomb and forgot how to put it back together again.

The snow was complicit, padding on the brownstone steps, ice in the trees. Zito was always underdressed, wearing Mulder’s old coat that hung on his slight shoulders, his slender arms. Mulder knew most everything there was to know about Zito’s body at this point, baffled by the aversion he had to injury or illness despite the sink of his ribs and his thin skin.

Their runaway winter, reflected in storefronts and the stick figures Zito drew on damp bar napkins. Mulder felt time speeding up, his peripheral vision blurred. Zito went skidding down frosted sidewalks on his heels, dared Mulder to lick metal. On Mulder’s stomach, Zito’s fingers were so cold they left gray marks.

Mulder would be happy just to let this happen, let Zito exist on the left side of the bed, leave Zito in record stores on long afternoons when Mulder went to see his brother or his few remaining childhood friends. He’d be happy taking Zito with him to the gym at Northwestern and seeing the sweat glaze Zito’s face and chest, the baseball scars rising again on the palms of his hands. Zito made him forget for hours at a time how his rookie year had ended.

They woke up into a blizzard, lashing flag-wide on the glass, strong enough that Mulder expected the snow to climb the three-story wall and crush through his bedroom windows, soak into the carpet and whitely bury their discarded jeans. Zito put his chin on Mulder’s arm and blinked at the storm.

“Dude,” Zito whispered in awe. “Natural disaster.”

Mulder’s jaw popped as he yawned. “Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t, the world’s ending out there.”

Turning to look at the alarm clock, Mulder groaned and rolled onto his stomach, dislodging Zito. He slung an arm across Zito’s chest to hold him down. “Three in the goddamn morning. You’re out of your mind.”

“How can you say that, look at it. I’ve never seen it snow like this.”

“Happens all the time. C’mon. Sleep.”

Zito bit his arm, sharp white teeth in the crease of Mulder’s elbow. “Because we’ve got so much to do tomorrow,” he said sarcastically. “That ‘Real World’ marathon isn’t going to watch itself.”

Mulder smirked involuntarily, liking it here with his eyes closed and Zito warm under him, the fading sting in his arm, Zito bitching familiarly in his ear.

“What exactly do you want to do?” he mumbled into the pillow, trailing his fingers on the sheet on the far side of Zito’s body. “Don’t think for a second I’m going out in that.”

“No, no,” Zito answered, sounding thoughtful, the back of his hand brushing across Mulder’s side. “We can’t go out there. We might die.”

“That’s just great, Barry.”

“We should do something, though,” Zito continued, ignoring the interruption. His breath was hot on Mulder’s arm and it made Mulder doubt the truth of the storm outside, the idea that he could ever be cold.

Mulder slid his arm down, draw of Zito’s skin, the room painted silver, streetlights hidden and the snow seemed to give off a glow of its own. Zito fairly vibrated with energy, his irritating tendency to jumpstart awake instead of fumbling slowly through it. Mulder felt Zito’s stomach jerking against the inside of his wrist.

“I could fuck you again,” he offered sleepily. “Just. Gimme a minute.” He sighed, sank back downwards as Zito stayed quiet. Soft clean blizzard thoughts, wondering distantly how Zito would react to a tornado.

“Are you falling back asleep?”

Mulder wished there was enough light for him to glare. He settled for clenching his fingers on Zito’s side, making him squirm nicely, his feet kicking at Mulder’s.

“The snow will still be there in the morning,” Mulder said, his mouth against Zito’s shoulder now, unsure when that had happened. “You know. Later in the morning.” His head was clouded, his eyelids so heavy he couldn’t get them to open.

“It won’t be the same.”

Zito had been born in the desert, brought up near the Mexican border. He matched summer effortlessly, lying sun-dry on the ocean the day Mulder met him, sweat-dark hair whenever Mulder thought of him without planning it. Seeing him against the white and the wind of Chicago in December was like a whole different person, jittery and iced over where his skin was exposed. It was remarkable, figuring him out for the second time.

Mulder thought maybe he should give Zito a break. He scuffed his cheek and said, “You’re right. It’ll stick, be up to your knees on the street tomorrow. But it won’t fall like this. It never does in the daytime.”

Zito breathed shallowly, Mulder’s arm moving with it. “See, I think that’s amazing.”

“You would.” Mulder smiled at nothing in particular. He tried to see if he could hear the thrush of the snow on the windows, ghost-wind howling fearfully, second-degree removed.

For several minutes, Zito remained still, goosebumps prickling and fading on his skin over and over again, Mulder tracking their progress. Mulder couldn’t remember how long it’d been since Zito had shown up uninvited. He drifted without paying attention to where he was going.

“Mark?” Zito whispered. Mulder hummed faintly, wiry red veins on the backs of his eyelids. “I’ve got to go home pretty soon."

“Yeah?”

Zito nodded, his chin brushing Mulder’s forehead. “Christmas. And New Year’s too.”

Opening his mouth slightly on Zito’s shoulder, Mulder answered muffled, “Of course.”

It was smooth, the way Zito tensed. Mulder imagined this was what he must feel like at the moment when he went into set position on the mound, his hands at his belt, his fingers crossing the stitches, his stomach drum-tight the way it was now. Mulder exhaled, tapping his thumb on Zito’s ribs, wordlessly urging him to calm.

“I guess.” Zito’s throat clicked, weirdly loud with Mulder this close. “I’ll see you in Phoenix.”

Mulder considered that, melting snow and the stretch of January like condemnation, all the things he’d done wrong in his life come back to punish him.

“Fuck Phoenix. You’ll come back here after New Year’s.” Mulder grinned, his teeth pressing into Zito’s shoulder, hearing Zito pull in a strange ragged breath, as if Mulder had followed through on his promise to fuck him again. Which Mulder would follow through on, in another minute, when the storm died down long enough for him to get his head on straight again.

“Is that. You want me to?” Zito moved, pushed himself up onto his elbow so that Mulder fell off like water. Mulder felt Zito staring at him, funny shocked look.

He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, losing all contact with Zito. The snow flickered on Zito’s face. He wondered how long it would take Zito to stop second-guessing, stop thinking that Mulder was just killing time. In an unknown and backward part of his mind, Mulder also wondered how long it would be before he got tired of Zito. He’d been waiting for almost five months now, surprised every day that it didn’t happen.

“All your stuff’s here, anyway,” Mulder told him, watching Zito’s mouth and listening to the weather outside like it was reason enough to stay here behind locked doors forever, trusting the windows not to break.

*

Chavez’s divorce goes through just after the All-Star break. Mulder waits in the car when Chavez is in his lawyer’s office, signing the paperwork. It seems unnatural, for Chavez’s wrecked life to be reduced to his famous signature, though Mulder supposes that they all signed big league contracts and all signed autographs and everything comes back to their names.

A cop clinks on his window and tells him to get out of the red zone. Mulder obligingly pulls up around the corner, his phone buzzing in the cup holder. It’s Zito. Mulder hasn’t seen him in three days, since before the break.

They talk distractedly about Milwaukee, the impossibility of a tie game in baseball, the absurdity of Zito only facing one batter for a team that would eventually run out of pitchers. Mulder doesn’t care much that Zito made the trip and he didn’t. They’re both still very young.

“Are you gonna come over tonight?” Zito asks, seagulls cawing behind his voice.

“Maybe. I don’t know. He’s gonna have a rough time, I think.” Chavez hasn’t been dealing well with any of this, and Mulder doesn’t expect that to change now that it’s really over.

Zito exhales into the receiver, thinking almost audibly. “Do you really think it’s a good idea for him to move in with you?”

“He’s got nowhere else to go, man.”

“He makes two million dollars a year, Mark, I think he can afford a hotel room.”

Mulder keeps watch on the side mirror, half view of his face and the suited downtown people congregating on the sidewalks and plazas for lunch. He idly wonders how many people will recognize Chavez when he comes out, how well Chavez will be able to fake his charming public smile.

“You’ve got a real admirable loyalty to your friends, you know, it’s one of my favorite things about you,” Mulder says, seeing his mouth warp.

“Hey. Shut up. I’m loyal. It’s just. He’s been so fucked up recently.”

“Yeah, well, he fits in pretty well.” Chavez emerged, his head down against the sun. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Whatever.” Zito pauses. “Tell him. Tell him I said I’m sorry.”

Mulder hangs up. Loyalty’s not really Zito’s problem. He doesn’t have faith in Chavez to stay on the right side of the line, doesn’t trust Mulder to keep Chavez there, but he’d still die for either of them without question.

Chavez gets in the car, still holding an expensive ballpoint pen, which Mulder thinks is pretty perverse, all things considered. He looks like he’s been hollowed out.

Mulder clears his throat. “You wanna do something?”

“No.” Chavez stares out the window, the line of his jaw strict.

Starting the car, Mulder flips the radio volume up high and puts his hand on the back of Chavez’s seat as he turns to look behind him. “Okay,” he says, feeling Chavez’s hair rustle on his hand.

They get back to Mulder’s house, their house, without speaking. Chavez is still sleeping on the couch, but that’s only until Mulder gets the shit cleared out of the spare room and buys a mattress.

Chavez goes right for the liquor on top of the refrigerator, tearing the label off and spinning the cap across the room like he doesn’t intend to stop drinking until the bottle’s empty. Mulder gets glasses as an afterthought, but Chavez is already on the couch, his throat working.

Mulder didn’t expect much else from tonight. The ballpoint pen sticks out of Chavez’s pocket, waiting to be thrown into the ocean. Chavez is the kind of man who would put bullets through old photographs, burn postcards, spit on the ground, use his hands to shatter everything she’s ever touched. Mulder has invited pure destruction into his home, said he could stay as long as he needed.

After half the bottle, the room feels like it’s in the grips of a low-level earthquake. Chavez’s eyes are swollen.

“This is terrible,” Chavez says after a long stretch of silence. “This isn’t something I know how to do.”

Mulder shifts, drinking from the bottle with the glasses spotless on the coffee table. “I don’t think anybody does, man.”

Chavez glances at him. They’ve been friends for a very long time, since before Zito played in the major leagues. Mulder would count him as a timeline, but Chavez never remembers anything that’s happened.

“What would you do?”

“What would I do, what?”

“If this happened to you. If Zito, like, called you motherfucker and told you never to come back.”

Mulder almost laughs at the image. It would never end like that for them. Zito wouldn’t break things cleanly, he’d much prefer to drag it out and scar every inch of skin. Zito’s hands would clench in his shirt and haul him back in, swear against Mulder’s body that he’d follow them down no matter how far they went. It would be a bad way to go, crippling instead of merciful, and ten years later, Zito would still be calling to tell him about weather he’d survived.

“We’re not married,” Mulder reminds him. “It’s not exactly the same thing.”

“Bullshit.” Chavez is slurring, but he doesn’t continue. Watery gray sunlight fights through the trees outside, closing in on dusk. Chavez’s balled-up socks are scattered on the floor.

They drink for a while longer. Mulder’s vision telescopes in and out, Chavez’s knee against his own. The sun disappears altogether, and Mulder almost electrocutes himself turning on the lamp. The edges of Chavez’s face are rounded by liquor and sixty yellow watts.

“New question,” Chavez says, and Mulder blinks at him, not remembering the old one. “You’re not actually gay.”

Under normal circumstances, Mulder would probably get angry, as angry as he ever gets, anyway, because he’s helping out a friend, not offering himself up for dissection. As it is, he can barely remember to keep drawing breath.

“That’s not a question.”

Chavez snickers, drunker than Mulder even though Mulder is drunk enough to fear the walls. He clocks his knee into Mulder’s. “’Kay. You’re not gay. You just sleep with Zito. Did you. Before, or, or after. During? Did he change you?”

Mulder gives that more thought than it warrants. He remembers the guys after Cape Cod, names but not faces. He’d always made sure that he’d never have to see them again. He remembers feeling like Zito had pulled something out of him on the beach, twisted his hand in so deep.

“Maybe a little,” he acknowledges. Chavez presses the bottle into his hand like surely Mulder needs a drink after that, but it’s empty.

“You shouldn’t have let him do that.”

Mulder shrugs, closing his eyes. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“That’s. That’s awful, Mark.” Chavez sounds heartbroken; he has all night long, but Mulder’s far enough gone now that he can hear it without making some idiot joke.

“It’s okay,” Mulder says. He’d gotten over this crisis four years ago, before he’d learned that Zito had been drafted by the A’s, before Zito had sped through the minors and reoccurred in Mulder’s consciousness for two weeks in Vancouver, three weeks in Sacramento, before anything important had happened. He can look back on it with odd fondness, like how he used to be scared of elevators.

“Doesn’t make much sense.” Chavez’s fingers fold against Mulder’s shoulder. “He’s not, like. The type of guy who should be able to do that to you.”

Shrugging again, Mulder leans slightly into Chavez’s hand. He’s never had any luck explaining what Zito does to him, not to himself, certainly not to another person.

“He’s different. You don’t see him like that.” Mulder is aware of Chavez’s hand opening, smoothing over his shoulder. Mulder’s shirt pulls and catches and Chavez’s thumb touches bare skin.

“Change,” Chavez says, bloodshot and forever altered by the first real failure of his life. “I hate being like this.”

Then he kisses Mulder, hot on Mulder’s jaw and on the corner of his mouth, teeth snicking, his fingers sweeping under Mulder’s shirt. Mulder rolls his head back and his equilibrium is shot, his mind skewing widely off-center. He raises his hand to the side of Chavez’s face and kisses him back.

There’s no marked difference in taste. Zito likes whiskey too, licking at the mouth of the bottle, licking at the roof of Mulder’s mouth, and once they’d lain together on the floor with Mulder’s life in boxes around them. Chavez’s hair isn’t as long, sticky with gel, and the callus on the heel of his palm scrapes at the base of Mulder’s throat. Warm and so drunk, Chavez pushing him back onto the couch, hard edge of Chavez’s body lining up with Mulder’s stomach.

A thought flashes through Mulder’s mind, wondering if Zito will want to hear this story as he has wanted to hear everything else. Zito digs for Mulder’s near-death experiences, defining moments, first time he saw the ocean, first time he kissed a girl, first time he kissed a boy, though of course Zito was there for that one. Zito wants to map him out, write down their separate histories so that he can see the moment when they began to intersect, and Mulder knows he’ll have to tell Zito this because it’s too incredible not to, the time Eric Chavez kissed me and it wasn’t too bad. He tries foggily to imagine how he’d feel if situations were reversed, but he stalls out.

Chavez’s hand presses flat on Mulder through his jeans, and his back arches a little, breathing into it. Chavez says Mulder’s name and he sounds like he’s crying. Mulder wants to skip ahead, get to the part where Chavez is scratching his shoulders and his heels are jammed into Mulder’s back.

Instead, Chavez rises for air and Mulder can see him then, his eyes screwed shut and his mouth contorted, and that’s not right. Zito always looks at him. Zito smiles so clean, spanning his hands on Mulder’s body and asking him in awe, jesus, did you feel that?

He shoves Chavez away. Chavez falls off the couch and cracks his head into the coffee table, a slash of red at his temple and blood inching down the thin path between his eye and his hair. The look on Chavez’s face is beyond priceless.

“Don’t do that again,” Mulder tells him, his mouth feeling strange and bitten. Chavez blinks at him, ideal in his shock. Mulder stands, and Chavez’s hand darts, grasping for a moment at Mulder’s leg before Mulder kicks him away. He almost loses his balance, his vision teary and stuttered, his stomach roiling.

“Goddamn it, Mark, don’t you _dare_ ,” Chavez half-screams from the floor, but Mulder doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“Living the fucking consequence, Eric.” Mulder holds the doorframe to steady himself. “How bad do you feel right now, you think I want that to happen to me?”

He leaves Chavez cursing and bleeding on the floor, follows the hallway to his bedroom and locks the door. Falling down onto his bed, he stares at things that don’t move until he’s sure he’s not going to throw up. A near memory throws itself at him, Chavez’s hair coming unstuck under Mulder’s fingers, curling at the ends.

An hour or two passes. Mulder lets the drunk run slowly in him, dampening his thoughts. The knock at his window scares him so bad he bites his tongue.

He carefully lifts his head, sees Zito standing spirit-like, flattening his hand on the glass so that fog sinks out around his fingers, mouthing something indistinct. Mulder is certain that he’s a hallucination, a dream, until he sees the ash on Zito’s fingers leaving pale streaks, too specific a detail.

Zito grins at him as he opens the window, standing out there in the grass. “Hiya.”

Mulder fists his hand in Zito’s shirt. “Get in here.” Zito climbs through the window, gawky like fourteen years old and suddenly six feet tall. Mulder is shaken, having trouble fighting his way through this.

Zito touches Mulder’s forehead. “Are you okay?”

Mulder shakes his head. “Fucked up. Fucked up night, you shoulda seen it.”

He collapses back onto the bed, feeling the mattress give as Zito sits next to him. “What happened?”

Waving his hand indistinctly, Mulder runs his tongue over the back of his teeth, finding no trace of Chavez, nothing but liquor now. “Chavez? Crazy. Crazier than we thought.”

Zito pushes his hand across Mulder’s stomach, setting off sparks because Mulder was more than half turned-on by previous events, and anyway, he hasn’t seen Zito since before the break. Maybe that’s why, a three day drought and any wet mouth would have been welcome.

“What’d he do?” Zito asks.

Something creaks in the rafters of the house. Mulder can picture Chavez tossing on the couch, too long, still sleeping in his jeans. “Wanted to. You know. Put his hands on me. Like, wow. Couldn’t believe it.”

Zito’s hand stops, hovering with fingertips defining an arc on flatland under Mulder’s ribs. Mulder’s eyes are closed, raced pieces of cotton and flint sparkling.

“Wait. What? You, he did _what_?” Zito’s voice is climbing panic.

Mulder places his hand on top of Zito’s, forcing it down, sweet pressure and air-thin T-shirt, heat gathering. “I didn’t let him. I told him not to.”

“You didn’t sleep with him?” Zito’s hand is wriggling, drag of knuckles, scratch of fingertips. His heartbeat is going so fast Mulder can hear it.

“Nah.”

Zito pauses. “Did you want to?”

And fuck Zito for not taking a straight answer and letting it be; he’ll get what he deserves.

Mulder shrugs. “Yeah.”

Long long moment of silence. Zito’s breath whistles. Mulder waits him out, wanting to feel Zito’s hand move on his stomach again.

Mulder’s almost asleep again, and Zito whispers, “But you didn’t.”

He links his fingers with Zito’s, his palm fit into the back of Zito’s hand. “He couldn’t do anything to me.”

Counting back, it’s been better than a year and a half since he slept with someone who wasn’t Zito. Astonishing thing to realize, like waking up in August of his minor league year, when baseball was everything behind him and everything before him too. At the heart of it, Mulder doesn’t really see the point in fucking around if means he might not get to fuck Zito anymore. Everything is so easy, sex for free except during the All-Star break.

He looks up to find Zito staring at him with a mix of confusion and relief and probably anger, somewhere below all the rest of it. Mulder smiles. “Quit worrying, man. C’mon. I’m drunk, so. Take off your shirt.”

And Zito barely hesitates before he obeys, stretch of skin and arms and Mulder won’t risk it. Mulder is overheated, slicing his hands over Zito’s shoulders, wanting nothing more than for life to stay the same as it is now. He learned a long time ago not to fuck with a good thing.

*

*

*

2004

Nothing’s changed.

Zito lays his fingers down on the stitches same as he has since he was seven years old. He can’t help remembering that curveballs are supposed to rip your elbow out and shred the tendons of your shoulder. The human body is not designed to throw a baseball, small trauma every day for twenty years, building up and he fully expects to wake up someday unable to lift his arm. He’ll burn that bridge when he gets to it, though, because he’s not in pain now and he can’t pitch to save his life.

At least injury would make sense. Mulder has spent his career bouncing calmly from the DL to the rotation, but he doesn’t talk in his sleep. He doesn’t see things that aren’t there. He’s not the one tailspinning in front of thousands of people once every five days.

Zito has escaped from the hotel, a block away sitting on the bumper of a car. His thumb is bleeding and the streetlights seem weirdly accusatory, almost judgmental. Zito’s sneakers are in sick-colored gutter water. Everyone wants to know what’s wrong with him. He had to get the fuck out.

It’s been like this for a month, the team starts slow and that’s how it’s always been. Zito dreams of the All-Star break, still two months away, the roll downhill and maybe he shouldn’t think about it in those terms. They go too fast at the end, brakes cut and something eventually gives out. But he would kill for speed right now, for ninety miles an hour to show on the gun, for the black to return to his eyes.

He’s taking a moment, away from his teammates and the press and the way they’re gaslighting him without even being aware of it. He doesn’t want to go back until the lobby is empty, the hallway silent, and he can sneak into Mulder’s room and sleep beside him and pretend the world will be different when they wake up.

Rich Harden appears on the curb, his hands in his pockets. The city’s light pollution has rubbed out even the moon. Harden’s wearing a T-shirt that used to belong to Mulder, mixed up in the laundry at some point.

“They’re looking for you, you know,” Harden tells him.

Zito fists his hands on the metal. “Apparently I’m not that hard to find.”

Harden smirks. “You’d be surprised.” He checks over his shoulder, and Zito follows his eyes, search parties, lanterns, bloodhounds. The sidewalk is barren, untouched; Harden must have materialized.

“Not to be rude or anything, but could you please fuck off?” Zito says sweetly.

Rolling his eyes, Harden sits next to Zito on the car, his shoulders pulled up. Zito scowls at him, but Harden doesn’t seem to care.

“Are you always like this when you’re doing badly?”

Harden has a slight problem with being too straightforward. Zito had appreciated that about him at first, tired of baseball clichés and Mulder telling him to shut up and go back to sleep at critical moments. But Zito had been pitching well when he’d first met Harden, which probably had something to do with it.

He props his heels up on the asphalt, looking down at his laces. “It’s possible this is as bad as I’ve ever done.”

“Really?”

“Fuck you, ‘really.’ Ask around.”

Harden angles him a crooked smile. “Well, I did that. Nobody’s got a fucking clue.”

Zito shifts, thrown because he thinks they might be talking about two different things. A fire engine goes screaming past and saves him from responding for a moment. Harden’s face is sinister in the red light, hollow-eyed and tufts of his finger-combed hair sticking up.

“It’s not gonna last, anyway,” Zito says eventually. “It’s just April, that’s all.”

Harden gives him a sideways look. “It’s interesting that you can say that without even knowing what’s wrong.”

Zito shakes his head. He does know, or anyway he feels like he does, like it’s under his skin and he’s only got to scrape the top layer off, see it okay then, the cause and the cure. He knows, he just can’t get to it right now.

“Did you. Why’d you come out here?” Zito asks him.

Badly lit, edge of his mouth twisted, Harden shrugs. “If you really didn’t want to be found, you would have gone farther than around the block.” He stands, offers Zito his hand. “C’mon. Need to get some sleep.”

Zito follows him back, comforted by the fact that Harden has been in the majors for only a couple of months. It’s easier talking to him than Hudson or Chavez or Mulder, because Harden’s got no frame of reference and he thinks the wreck of Zito’s season so far is an anomaly, not an inevitability.

Mulder’s drunk in the lobby, sprawled out on the long couch near the window. The people at the desk are glaring at him, but not saying anything. Zito stops, looking at Mulder with his legs tossed over the arm of the couch, his arm hanging off so that his hand rests folded on the shiny floor.

Harden puts his hand on Zito’s shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Harden leaves, one glance back over his shoulder as he gets to the elevators.

Zito crosses over to Mulder, kneeling beside the couch. “Mark.”

Mulder’s eyes come open and he blinks up at Zito, slow smile on his face. “You’re back?”

Taking his arm and pulling him up, Zito answers, “Yeah. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“Fuck’s the matter with _you_?” Mulder slurs, tossing his arm around Zito’s shoulders and leaning heavily on him. “At least I got drunk first.”

“For the whole world to see.”

Mulder almost trips, knocking his head into Zito’s. “What?” he asks in confusion, and his feet are sliding on the marble. The hotel people are watching them go with disgust, but the A’s have a certain reputation for this, or at least, they did three years ago.

Zito gets them into the elevator and props Mulder against the wall. Mulder keeps a hand in Zito’s belt, keeping him close. Dim little pings chime as they climb floors.

“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” Mulder tells him.

It’s stupid. Zito wants to snap back, break a couple of Mulder’s fingers. Mulder’s not allowed to say anything, not pitching as well as he is right now.

Pushing a hand through his hair, Zito gently disentangles Mulder and steps away, leaning against the opposite wall with his arms back, hanging onto the brass rail. The feeling of being in motion is not really what he needs right now, wishes they’d taken the stairs.

“I know.”

“Anyway, I’ve been watching.” Mulder grins, lax and pulled like taffy. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”

“The box scores would seem to disagree.”

“Grip like this.” Mulder’s hand moves and Zito can’t tell what pitch he’s trying to show. “Arm angle right here. Throwing at something that, that doesn’t even move. So. It’s easy.”

Sadly, the doors shush apart before Zito has a chance to hit Mulder. He drags Mulder down the hall, stumbling into his room, three down from Mulder’s. Shadows coat the floors and walls, the curtains drawn, Zito’s stuff spilled all over and making it a dangerous trip to get Mulder to the bed and let him fall. Zito pulls off Mulder’s shoes and Mulder laughs at the ceiling, turning his foot in Zito’s hand.

“Rich found you?” Mulder asks him, up on an elbow and Zito’s eyes are adjusting to the dark, able to pick out the blue.

“I wasn’t that well hidden.” Zito undresses, briefly considering brushing his teeth, settling for water drunk from his cupped hands. Mulder is struggling with his belt when Zito comes back in, so Zito helps him and presses his fingers into the backs of Mulder’s knees, the steep curve of his hip, rise of his collarbones like things buried in the sand.

“Too drunk,” Mulder mumbles when Zito distractedly runs his thumb under the waistband of Mulder’s boxers, the skin there soft and bumpy from the elastic. “Can’t even see.”

“Your eyes are closed, dude.”

Mulder nods. “Yeah. It’s gonna be okay.”

“Sure.”

Zito sets his cell phone for six in the morning, time enough to fuck quickly and get Mulder back to his own room with no one the wiser. He wonders sometimes how well they’ve kept the secret, seeing the way the guys look at him sometimes, the bitter snag in Eric Chavez’s expression following them around, Rich Harden smirking at him when he shows up for breakfast at Mulder’s house. It’s been four years. It’s just habit at this point.

Lying down, slick smooth sheets and the rustle of Mulder breathing from a couple feet away, Zito resolutely turns his mind to other things, swearing that he won’t dream about baseball tonight. Mulder says his name hazily, but Zito feigns sleep, searching helplessly for pain somewhere in his body.

*

2003

By the middle of August, Zito was having trouble paying attention to the outside world.

He’d been pitching (terribly) less than well all season. His thumbnail was still misshapen from when he’d hammered it flat hanging up the Cy Young plaque over his parents’ mantle in the off-season. The things that had happened to him were connected in more ways than just chronology, but chronology was the first thing to go.

There was the team, a smear of familiar faces swimming up to him and asking him things, and Zito blinked, said, “What?” His parents came up for his starts and asked him why he hadn’t been answering his phone. Zito checked and had thirty-six new voicemails.

It was something like a fever. Or half-drunk all the time. Colors and sounds were brief, he’d latch on to something and then it’d be gone. He wasn’t thinking about pitching and that was a relief. Zito didn’t mind the disconnect at all, liking the space around him, surprised by everyday things.

Mulder said, “ _Hey_ ,” and Zito jerked, looked up at him in surprise. Mulder roughly pushed his hand across Zito’s forehead. “I was calling you for like ten minutes.”

“Oh, I. I didn’t hear.” He looked around, they were in his apartment and he was on the couch and Mulder was standing in front of him. The television wasn’t even on.

“God, what’s with you lately?” Mulder asked, flopping down beside him and wincing.

“I just didn’t hear you, Mark, no big deal.” Zito cocked his head to the side, taking inventory of the situation, black sky out the windows, Mulder turning on the TV, Zito’s stomach rumbling. “Did you order food?”

“Yeah.”

Mulder flipped through channels, blue colors skittering nervously off his eyes, and Zito leaned back into the couch, closing his eyes. He was missing phone calls, crossing against the red, losing his train of thought mid-word. He woke up on the field, he woke up to Mulder saying his name and tugging his hair. Tunnel vision made the world go slow around him, something he vaguely remembered as having happened a long time ago.

There wasn’t much going on, in or out of the apartment. The city was abnormally quiet. Mulder was bored, showing it in his slouch and the irritated patter of his fingers on Zito’s knee. Mulder occasionally questioned Zito’s state of mind, but he was easily distracted, relieved to be, because Mulder didn’t like talking about anything that mattered.

Anyway, Zito was fine, not quite there. Mulder had been pitching like he was channeled, and Zito didn’t want any part of that.

Mulder was saying something. Zito had tranced out again. He rubbed the back of his neck and took a stab. “Um, yeah. Sounds good.”

Mulder’s fingers fell silent on Zito’s knee. Zito sighed. “All right. Obviously I wasn’t listening. Sorry. What’d you say?”

Licking his lips quickly, Mulder shrugged. “Wasn’t important.” He glanced at Zito out of the corner of his eye, popping his knuckles on Zito’s leg.

Zito cleared his throat, overwhelmed the way he got sometimes when he thought about how long it’d been, how Mulder kept showing up. He stood up. “You want a beer?”

Mulder placed his hand on Zito’s stomach, his face tilted up. There was an eyelash on his cheek that Zito brushed away without thinking.

“This space cadet thing is not the most endearing thing you’ve ever done.”

Zito’s mouth curled. “Well, good thing I’m not doing it to amuse you, huh?”

Slow drag of Mulder’s hand across his stomach, Mulder knew exactly what he was doing, digging his fingers hard into the hollow of Zito’s hip to make him jerk. A glaze spread across Mulder’s eyes, watching Zito bite his lip. Zito felt a thread of power go through him at being above Mulder like this, so rare. Mulder used every inch of his height; he always had.

“You know,” Mulder said carefully, edging up Zito’s shirt. “I meant to tell you before. You’re doing this thing. With your two-seam. Like, almost, almost a slider. It’s new.”

He leaned forward and opened his mouth on Zito’s stomach. Zito’s knees buckled and he swore, grabbed onto Mulder’s shoulders. Mulder scratched his teeth and there was a shocking pressure that folded inward, and then he moved back, looking up at Zito with nothing written on his face.

“I think if you just change your grip a little bit, it’d break like you want it to.”

Zito sneered at him, not wanting to talk about pitching with small wet patches on his stomach chilling as they dried. “Okay, we’ll fucking try that, so why don’t you just-”

Mulder hooked an arm around Zito’s waist and pulled him down, painful and clumsy for a moment until his knees were to either side of Mulder’s body and Mulder licked his throat, wide hand on Zito’s back under his shirt.

“Got your attention now, don’t I?” Mulder murmured, and Zito clutched Mulder’s shoulder, annoyed by the ploy and how completely he’d fallen for it. Mulder breathed out a laugh, bit his collarbone and Zito called him a few bad names, shaking, half-listening for a knock at the door.

His hand on the back of Mulder’s neck, Zito bent to kiss him and his weight shifted, heavy to the right and Mulder suddenly jerked backwards, hissing through his teeth. Zito froze, his mouth on Mulder’s cheek.

“What?” he whispered. Mulder shook his head, his eyes shut and he was in pain, fingers in claws on Zito’s shoulder blade.

“Nothing. A little sore. My hip. Never mind, here.” He levered up and opened his mouth against Zito’s. Zito cautiously rearranged until his weight was evenly distributed again, kissed him like he could take the pain out of Mulder that way, swallow it down.

“I’m sorry,” Zito told him, feeling the push of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, feeling Mulder hot as a star beneath him. “I am paying attention, I swear.”

“It’s okay, man,” Mulder said, kissing him on the mouth again. Both his hands were up under Zito’s shirt now, his forearms long and warm pressed down on his back. “It’d be weird if you were normal.”

That was a transparently backhanded compliment, but Zito was really in no position to complain. He ground down into Mulder, feeling the twist of his sides against Mulder’s upper arms. Everything had been coming to him in swatches recently, car alarms shrieking at him, blades of grass on the palms of his hands, startled into awareness in unpredictable places.

Mulder thumbed open Zito’s jeans and Zito’s spine cracked. His shirt was rucked up and he could feel everything as it happened, a linear sequence of events and Mulder’s mouth moving on his chest.

*

Zito comes over to the East Bay on an off-day, which is a regular thing. The morning is astonishing, messy hills, wide highway, billboards hung up like postcards against the sky. His plan for the day is to think about nothing for as long as possible, and Mulder’s usually pretty good for that.

They’re still asleep when he lets himself in the house, Bobby Crosby’s door open so that Zito can see his sloped back, his head under a pillow. Zito makes himself some breakfast and steals a Coke.

He’s on the porch, liquid in the sun and reading a magazine, and the sliding door squeals as it opens. Harden staggers out, his eyes shut, his cheeks drawn hollow. He’s got a pair of sunglasses in his hand and he’s not wearing a shirt.

“You’re parked on top of a rose bush, you know,” Harden informs him, gracefully taking the lawn chair next to Zito’s and chunking the back all the way down.

“I thought they were all dead.”

“Certainly are now.” Harden flicks his sunglasses open and puts them on, lying down. He’s been trying to even out the shade of his skin, eradicate the pale on his chest and stomach. He never seems to find it strange when Zito ends up at their house, ten a.m. on a Monday in June.

Zito glances reflexively at Mulder’s window. It’s open, though the shades are pulled. The window’s almost always open, so that Zito can climb in and back out again a few hours later. Sometimes, he wonders why Mulder even bothered to make him a key.

“He was up pretty late last night,” Harden says. “Probably be awhile before he gets up.”

The sunglasses are perfect black cover, not that Zito’s ever had any luck reading Harden’s eyes.

He swallows hard. “What?”

Harden gestures lazily at the house. He looks carved, strength in his shoulders and chest even though he’s really not big enough to throw as hard as he does. “Mark.”

Zito makes his face still, clinging to the metal of the chair. “Okay.”

The corner of Harden’s mouth curls up. “Just, you know. In case you were wondering.”

It’s too early to be dealing with this. Zito takes the sunglasses on Harden’s face and is rocked back by Harden’s eyes, which are about five times bluer than Mulder’s.

“If you’ve got something to say, dude, fucking say it.”

Harden studies him for awhile, then shrugs, the bumps atop his shoulders sliding under his skin. “Whatever.” He holds out his hand and Zito reluctantly gives him his sunglasses back. They don’t talk for a long time. It’s a pretty open secret, anyway.

Zito adjusts his chair down and lets the sunlight coat his closed eyelids, maroon and gold in the front of his mind. His arm aches dully, memory of three days ago, like he was dismantled and put back together improperly. There are no plans for the off-day; they’ll be lucky to get farther than the end of the driveway.

It’s rough and he can’t keep his thoughts in a straight line. He ends up on the field again, leaving his fastball up, hanging the curve, tipping the change, and it’s batting practice. The sky is poised to crash down on him, the chattering animalistic sounds of the crowd, Mulder waiting for him in the dugout. Mulder looking frustrated and pissed off, as if he were the one suffering, as if Zito had been body-swapped and wasn’t worth anything anymore.

Zito’s sick of this. Baseball has lost its appeal again, and Mulder has been pitching better than anyone else in the league. Impossible not to feel a measure of resentment, mixed in with pride and desire, because Mulder is a solid thing even if it took two years for Zito to accept that, and sometimes he wishes Mulder would break, just a little, bring them down to the same level again.

Harden scratches at his stomach, rasp of his fingers, subtle red lines in the tracks of his nails. Hanging out with Harden is difficult, a lot of the time, because Harden is as young as Zito was when they first came up. Zito has an itemized list of all the things that have changed since he was twenty-two years old, remembers a rookie year like unmanned flight, and Mulder, sinking deeper every day.

“Richie?”

“Hmm?”

“Have you noticed, like. Me doing anything different from last year?”

Letting his head roll to the side, Harden regards Zito through his sunglasses. It’s a comment on Zito’s mental state, or maybe the sky in Canada, but he thinks he can see the color through the black.

“I’m not really the guy to ask about that stuff,” Harden tells him.

“Sure you are. You’re, like, new. You haven’t known me since I was fucking nineteen years old.”

Harden laughs. “Who the fuck has known you since you were nineteen, man?”

Zito flushes, shakes it off. “Never mind, I’m just saying. You’ve got the fresh perspective. You know. No history to mess you up.”

A white butterfly alights on Harden’s stomach. He doesn’t feel it, lifting his eyebrows. “Anyway, that’s not why. I mean, like, I don’t really know much about it. Pitching. Baseball.”

Watching the butterfly inch its way down the dip between muscles, Zito snorts a laugh. “Right. If you don’t want to get into it, you can just say so. No need to make shit up.”

Harden shrugs. “I’m not. I don’t know anything about baseball. My dad signed me up to keep me busy between hockey seasons. I can pitch, but that’s all. I look at you when you’re out there and I can never tell when you’re tired or when you’re doing something wrong or when your release point’s all fucked up.”

Zito looks at him in shock. Harden smirks. “Don’t tell me that surprises you.”

Zito shakes his head. The butterfly crawls over Harden’s belly button briefly, sensitive spot and he brushes his hand absentmindedly, sending it to flit like a piece of flame through the air. He half-expects Harden to be struck down for blasphemy, checking the sky worriedly for lightning.

“You’re insane,” Zito says flatly. Harden shrugs again, looking entirely unconcerned. Zito wants to take the sunglasses off, hold Harden down, force him to admit that it matters, it’s everything.

“I’m, like, the least insane person you know.” Harden grins, strange on his face, wide open and almost boyish.

The sliding door squeals again, and Zito shoots his eyes over, blank relief to see Mulder standing there, rubbing his shoulder and yawning. His face is narrow against the sunlight.

“Hey,” Mulder says, staying in the shade of the overhang because he’s barefoot and the cement is melting hot. “Didn’t know you were here.”

“He’s always here,” Harden mutters, and Zito glares, not trusting him. Harden doesn’t believe in baseball, doesn’t believe Zito’s collapse means anything, and friends don’t do that to each other. Mulder would never do that to him.

Zito stands, crossing the smoked land. He puts his hand on Mulder’s stomach and Mulder throws him off without thinking about it, but Harden is reclined again, his scattered gold hair and ivory-colored arm the only things showing. He’s not looking at them. He doesn’t care.

Zito slips past Mulder, taking hold of his shirt as he passes, and leads Mulder staggering back through the dark house.

“What’s going on?” Mulder asks, his voice blurred and sleepy. “Did you fuck up?”

But Zito doesn’t answer, wanting to get Mulder and all his simple non-answers behind a locked door, and he’ll worry about the repercussions after he’s improved the morning.

*

Something important had happened.

Zito was down in the clubhouse, his headphones in and the television on, drifting mildly. Eric Byrnes was abnormally quiet, lying on the couch playing Gameboy, low whistling and his hair crushed in flat gold curls.

Mulder appeared, flanked by the trainers. There was a break between songs and Zito heard him saying, “I don’t need to go, I won’t,” and then guitars crashed and Mulder was vanishing.

Zito sat up straight, pulled his headphones off. “Is the game over?”

Byrnes didn’t bother looking at him. “Not unless it broke a record. It’s not even eight o’clock.”

Zito’s watch was said ten minutes to five, but they were probably just on the East Coast. He changed the channel away from Cartoon Network and the game’s broadcast was at commercial. If the clocks were right, Mulder couldn’t have lasted longer than the third, and Zito feared the score, seven runs maybe, eight, and their offense hadn’t been doing much lately.

The ceiling shook and rattled. Old ballpark with thin barriers. Zito got up and washed his face, water turning his hands blue. As he walked the incline of the tunnel, the sound swelled and rolled down at him. Coming into the dugout, the world was Christmas green and red, Fenway in the drench of the August heat.

Chad Harville was warming up, and the Red Sox were only up by two runs. Zito, still half-asleep, found Hudson on the bench.

“Dude?” he asked, immediately twisting his hand in Hudson’s jersey sleeve.

“Don’t hang on me, kid,” Hudson said, impatiently shaking Zito off. His eyes were fixed on the field, Chavez and Tejada talking anxiously behind second base, the wild flailing crowd and their gray team enemies on the grass.

“What. Why’s Mark out of the game?”

“Jesus, weren’t you watching?” Hudson darted him a disbelieving glance, anger and vague fear adding freakish color to slate.

Zito shrugged helplessly. “I, I just looked away for a minute.”

He’d been watching cartoons. Listening to a shamefully bad pop singer that he secretly loved. Trying to figure out how Byrnes was doing on the Gameboy by the tapping pattern of his thumbs. He’d barely been conscious.

“What’s wrong with him, Huddy?”

Hudson shook his head, his mouth a wire. “Hurt. He was breaking his motion. He was limping when he came off.”

Zito refused it automatically, recalling Mulder down there in the clubhouse, strict and well-formed, moving easily, he hadn’t been limping. But Zito couldn’t be sure, he might have missed it.

“Is he okay?” Zito asked, fitfully scanning his piecemeal memory, trying to remember, how far out were they, was it the wild card or the division tonight, was he the team’s best pitcher (impossible) or was it Hudson, was it Mulder? Day-to-day or six weeks? What was the fucking _date_?

“How’m I supposed to know? Fuck.”

It couldn’t be good. Hudson was mad at him, and Hudson was almost never mad at him. The game started up again, and Zito heard the coaches talking about tendinitis and Mulder not backing up the plate, losing the fundamentals that were more fused than taught.

Zito watched an inning or two in silence. Mulder had been hurt before, but never this late in the season, not in a season like this. The crowd roared, subsided to individual voices.

Chavez came into the dugout, taking off his cap like a penitent, a grimy brown line of dirt on his forehead and a shine of sweat on his neck. “How is he? Any word?” he asked the world in general, and nobody answered. Zito didn’t like Chavez asking after Mulder, and he stood, external forces drawing him back underground, into the clubhouse.

Byrnes was right where Zito had left him, one leg hung over the back of the couch. Half-closed blue eyes touched Zito’s momentarily over the game.

“Still losing?” Byrnes asked.

“Yeah. Where’s Mulder?” Zito put his hand on Byrnes’s ankle, just to have something to hold onto.

“Took him to the hospital for X-rays,” Byrnes answered. Zito pressed hard on the underside of Byrnes’s anklebone, making his face scrunch. “Dude.” He kicked Zito’s hand away, looking irritated.

“X-rays?”

“Yes, Barry, X-rays. We’re fucked.” Byrnes blew his hair upwards. “So totally fucked.”

Zito imagined running out of the clubhouse, hail a cab while still dressed in his uniform. Fly through the city with the buildings from history books and end up at the hospital, his shirt torn across the heart. Very melodramatic like that, like three days awake and two days drunk, running hard on coffee laced with speed.

Byrnes was playing his fucking Gameboy as if nothing else in the world existed. Zito didn’t know what to do, Mulder vanished, Mulder sketched in radioactive green in an examination room somewhere. He didn’t even know what hospital they would have gone to.

Incredibly, they won the game that night, came on strong, late, and the charred sky above Fenway Park reflected quiet back down, white paper littered in foul ground. The cost of victory was too high, and no one much talked in the clubhouse, or on the bus back to the hotel.

It was past curfew when a rumor snaked its way down their floor, room to room, infielders caballing, outfielders drunk in the hallway. Something irreparable had shown up on Mulder’s X-ray, something unexpected. He had been put on a plane to Arizona to see a specialist. It was possible that they’d never see him again.

Zito tried to call him for three straight hours, straight to voicemail and his hands fuzzed in his vision. After months of caroming without intention off the struts and obstacles of his mind, he was locked in again, focused like three-and-one with the bases loaded, throwing nothing but pitches in the zone.

Mulder picked up at four in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, and Zito was too tired to do the math for Arizona. His eyes scraped with beach sand.

“Tell me,” he said to Mulder, heard Mulder’s slow breath.

“Stress fracture in my hip,” Mulder told him plainly. “Worst of all possible worlds.”

That wasn’t right, there were worse things. Zito couldn’t think of any at the moment, but that was probably just the late hour. He could barely breathe.

“Are you sure?” he asked stupidly.

Mulder almost laughed, saying with his voice badly roughed up, “No, I’m making shit up to scare you. God.”

Zito stayed quiet. The red minutes on the alarm clock flipped over. Eventually, Mulder sighed.

“Look. Go to sleep. I’ll see you when you get back to Oakland. And don’t, don’t let it fuck you up. More important things to worry about, okay?”

“Okay,” Zito whispered. He wished savagely that he’d kept his eye on Mulder the way he’d promised, hadn’t let his mind wander. If he’d been in the dugout, if he’d been _watching_.

“Go to sleep,” Mulder said again, broken on a long vowel. “Call me when you wake up.”

Zito nodded, letting his eyes fall closed.

*

Mulder’s driving, bent arm on the window and the dashboard is hot enough to sear off Zito’s fingerprints. Harden and Crosby are in the back, bickering so fervently Zito expects them to tape a line down the middle of the seat and order each other to stay on their side.

The windows are all down, negating the air conditioning, a hundred and five degrees in the valley. Hills crowd the rearview mirror, and Zito is downing Gatorades, leaving his hand in the cooler of ice for long minutes. They’re going golfing.

“That is not what happened,” Crosby says in outrage, and pokes his head between the seats. “Dude, tell him that’s not what happened.”

His forehead leaves a damp spot on Zito’s arm, Zito drawing back against the door. “I don’t even know what you guys are talking about.”

Crosby scowls. “You’re a big help. Mark-”

“Shut up, Bobby,” Mulder says cheerfully. Earlier this morning, he was named the starter for the All-Star Game, getting the call from Joe Torre with Zito’s arm across his stomach, the two of them sweat-stuck together and amazed in the heat. He’ll leave for Houston tonight and nothing can change that.

Crosby fades back, muttering. Harden is ignoring him, permanent flush on his cheeks. Zito can see him in the side mirror, angled slice of scary blue eyes, staring out at the fields.

“I think it’s too hot to be outside.” Zito turns to Mulder hopefully, seeing the skin of his arm redden and burn. “I think this is a sign. We should stay indoors. With air conditioning. And ice cubes. Popsicles.”

“Oh, but going outside during a snowstorm was the best idea ever, huh?” Mulder retorts.

Zito feels blood rise to his face and he would give just about anything to be in Chicago in the wintertime right now. The car is silent for a minute, and then Harden asks casually:

“When were you guys in a snowstorm together?”

Mulder’s hands tighten minutely on the wheel, muscle in his jaw jumping. He darts a look at Zito and Zito lies automatically.

“I got stuck in Chicago ‘cause of a blizzard. What was that, Mark, two-three years ago?” Mulder shrugs, clearing his throat. “Thirteen fucking hours in the airport. Called everyone I knew to kill the time. We. We were talking on the phone. He told me not to go outside.”

“You would have died,” Mulder says quietly. Zito swallows, checks to see Harden’s eyes in the mirror, blank and watchful.

History efficiently rewritten, Zito wipes his eyes and says, “I think my brain is melting.”

Harden snorts, scuffing a hand across his cheek. Mulder half-smiles at Zito, they’re in this thing together. Zito watches Mulder’s fingers sliding on the wheel, the flicker-flash of sunlight on his face, broken up by telephone poles, sleek running power lines.

They break over a rise and the golf course is kelly green, pearled and jarringly incongruent in the middle of the dry land. Mulder hums quickly under his breath, the car picking up speed. Zito sighs to himself, wondering why he let himself get talked into this again.

“What’s it like?” Crosby asks from the back. Mulder glances at the mirror.

“What?”

“All-Star Game.”

Zito and Mulder exchange another look, one that can be left out in the open for once. Zito thinks back to Mulder’s bed that morning, damp sheets, torn foil, lost shirts. He isn’t supposed to spend the night in Mulder’s room, he’s supposed to go out the window and drive home, or at the very least, sneak to the couch before the sun comes up. But it was too hot to move. When Torre had called, Zito had felt a manic urge to yell, “Hi Joe!” crawling up his throat.

No one had seen him in the morning. They’d gotten lucky. For four years now, they’d gotten lucky.

“Well,” Mulder says, almost drawling. “Talk to Barry. He’s gone more than me.”

“We’re tied now,” Zito reminds him.

“Not until after Tuesday.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Crosby says sharply. Zito grins, wanting to touch the flushed side of Mulder’s neck.

He turns to look at Crosby, added bonus of his arm pressing up against Mulder’s. Crosby is underdressed for a country club, tattered board shorts and a yellow frayed collared shirt. Harden is staring out the window again, his arms crossed over his chest. His forearms are smooth and colored bronze and it distracts Zito for a minute.

“It’s like how you’d expect. It’s cool. Lotsa people. More press than even New York. Everybody wants to talk to you all the time. It’ll be worse for Mark, since he’s starting.”

“Don’t hate, man,” Mulder answers lazily, his eyes locked on the golf course, growing in the windshield until the green looked almost real. Zito smirks, pushing his elbow into Mulder’s arm subtly, feeling Mulder push back.

“It’s stupid,” Harden says suddenly. Crosby flinches as if struck. “We play every day for six months. One break and it’s only three days and you have to spend it talking to the fucking press?”

No one says anything, shocked tension clouding the air. Even knowing that Harden doesn’t care about baseball the way he should, Zito still feels ashamed, like he’s run headlong into a wall.

“Fuck you, Richie,” Crosby bites off, true believer confronted with blasphemy.

“Fuck you right back, Bobby.” Harden’s eyes crash into Zito’s, making something chill and frightening snap in his stomach. “Like I’m not allowed to want to stop and fucking breathe for three days?”

“Keep your mouth shut,” Mulder says, his face hard. “We’re here.”

They get out of the car and the heat falls down like a veil. Zito thinks that there’s possibly nothing in the world he wants to do less than play golf right now.

Mulder outpaces him across the parking lot, and Crosby scampers to keep up, shooting furious betrayed looks back at Harden. Harden unbuttons the top few buttons of his shirt and leans against the car, looking at Zito steadily.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Zito tells him. Harden lifts his eyebrows.

“No?”

“Jesus, Rich. He’s supposed to be your friend. This is supposed to be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.” Zito doesn’t really believe that, but it sounds pretty good.

Harden just laughs. “That’s actually depressing, you know?” Sweat gleams in the hollow of Harden’s throat. Zito’s mouth is dry. “And what about you? The year you’ve had, you really want to talk about Mulder starting the All-Star Game?”

Zito’s lip curls. He wants to put his fists against Harden’s chest and hold him down. Show him the scar on his knee and the bruises on his arms and make him understand that this is not a temporary thing for any of them. The year he’s had, the gravitation pull of Harden’s thoughtlessness, dumb and addicting because maybe Zito doesn’t want to care so much anymore.

Mulder is a thin slash of white shirt, disappearing into the pro shop. Steam ghosts up from the black asphalt, blinding white off the chrome.

“Just. Don’t say it in front of him, okay?”

Harden nods slowly, dense shadows under his eyes, something sheer in the set of his mouth, the cut of his shoulder into his collar. Zito is at once painfully, physically aware of him, like the weather on his back, the plummet of his first half, like when Mulder comes into the dugout breathing hard, his mouth open.

“This was a bad idea,” Harden says absently. He rubs his fingers at the place where his neck meets his chest. “I’m so fucking tired.”

Zito blinks fast and says, “Yeah,” and then he wraps his hand in the bottom of Harden’s shirt, slick blazed skin against his knuckles, pulling for a moment before Harden gives in and starts moving under his own power again.

*

Mulder didn’t handle injury very well. He never had, and Zito got to see this new setback laid like film across the old ones. Mulder didn’t seem to sleep anymore. He drank the dangerous kind of coffee, dragged the insides of his wrists hard across Zito’s face so that Zito could feel the nervous strum there, broken up like a half-learned second language.

When Mulder had been hurt in the past, his shoulder, his back, he’d forgotten to be careful, moved too fast, tried to carry his own bags. He got really into bad television shows that played in two-hour blocks of reruns at two in the morning, and Zito slept on the couch beside him, flag-dreaming and training himself to tune out the TV and Mulder talking under his breath.

This time, Mulder stayed away for a couple of days, maybe a week. Zito saw him at the ballpark and in the hallway of his house when Zito came over. But Zito would try to put his hand on Mulder, take him aside to some convenient side room, and Mulder would say something that sounded okay out of context, actually kinda busy, hang on I’ll be right back, dude they need me down in the weight room, and then Mulder would be gone.

It took awhile for Zito to realize that Mulder was avoiding him, and even longer for him to get over his initial reaction of well-then-fuck-you-too. Three years of regular sex, abruptly interrupted, had kinda ruined his ability to hold a grudge.

He went to Mulder’s house, heartless black time just before the morning started to tint the air. The window was still open, and Zito climbed in quickly, not wanting to give Mulder a chance to cut him off. Mulder was at his computer with headphones on, sickly hospital-blue light.

Zito took off his shirt, messing up his hair the way Mulder seemed to like, and soft-stepped across the room. The whole thing seemed impossibly stupid, a stress fracture, the blue-eyed kid from Canada taking Mulder’s spot in the rotation, the pennant race circling them like attack dogs, and Zito had been doing his best to refocus. He’d spent too long in transit, forcefully stuck inside his own head where he didn’t have to worry about his record or any of the things that had gone wrong this year. They were both paying for it now, but none of that would matter in the long run.

Mulder’s shoulder blades were outlined in hooks against his shirt. There were dusky orange prescription bottles ranked like pillars atop a stack of CDs. Zito came up behind him and pulled his headphones off.

Mulder shouted and spun, slamming his elbow into Zito’s sternum. Zito lost his breath and stumbled back, fell onto the bed. There were bright whickers of neon colors behind his eyes.

“ _Fuck_ , Barry.” Mulder stood, his face black with the light at his back. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Zito coughed. “Yeah, well, I think you broke a rib, so we’re even, okay?”

Looking cornered, Mulder pushed his hands at his sides in search of pockets that weren’t there. He crossed his arms over his chest instead. “What’s up?”

Zito shrugged, his hand flat on his chest, picturing the bruise rising, messy work of blood vessels broken up under the skin. “Just came by to say hi.”

“Hi,” Mulder echoed flatly. Zito grinned, waved like a dope.

“Hi.”

“Okay.” Mulder made as if to pace, then stopped. He didn’t limp anymore, but he kept his weight carefully balanced on the untouched side of his body when he was still. “Now that that’s out of the way.” He gestured at the window. Zito rolled his eyes.

“You’re not really dealing with this all that well, you know.”

“Really? You got some fucking pointers for me?”

Sighing, Zito leaned back on his hands. “Quit it.” Mulder glared at him, but kept quiet. “Why are you trying to run me off?” Zito asked.

Mulder shook his head. “I’m not. Or at least, not forever. I’d just rather not be, like, distracted right now.”

They’d been telling the press that they didn’t expect Mulder to return this season. There was one last-ditch month to play and then, god willing, October, and Billy Beane said that you can’t just go out and find another Mark Mulder. But Mulder had been in with the trainers and Zito had seen him throwing off flat ground in front of sixty thousand empty seats.

Mulder didn’t sleep because the medication kept him up. He was working in secret to be ready for the playoffs, and it would be the greatest deke of all time if they could pull it off.

Zito had other priorities, though.

“If you think I’m gonna stay away until the season’s over, you’re kinda out of luck,” he told Mulder.

“Whatever,” Mulder muttered. “I’m surprised you’ve even noticed that I’m not around.”

It was a deliberate hit, but Zito had already wrung dry that particular guilt all by himself. He stood, wanting to be on the same level again.

“I’m not, like, fair-minded, Mark. Don’t think that me getting off track this year means that I’m gonna let you do the same thing.”

Zito slipped his hand under Mulder’s shirt, resting lightly on his injured hip. He imagined he could feel the rift, thought that if he pushed hard enough, if Mulder came for him as hard as he always had, the bone might split, snap him into two long pieces.

Mulder looked at him with his eyes hooded. “It’s not like I wouldn’t, you know. Be back after.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Zito found it a bit strange, playing his fingers on the sturdy curve, pushing up to touch Mulder’s ribs and the place between that made Mulder jerk. “I won’t distract you. You can tell me to leave whenever, I don’t care. I might not go sometimes, but you can still tell me.”

Zito smiled, having forgotten in his months-long fugue what it was like to be truly engaged with the viscera of life around him. Like shallow red scrapes on the heels of his hand with dirt ground in, a kind easy sting when he made fists. Like sand under his fingernails, broken glass at his feet. Like throwing rocks. Like the way he wanted to go down on Mulder in alleys and on street corners, for the pain in his knees, small discomfort that made everything else that much better.

“You’ve been hiding,” Mulder told him, and laid the side of his hand down on Zito’s bare chest. “Took something like this to snap you out of it?”

Zito shook his head, moved his hand under Mulder’s shirt until it mirrored the position of Mulder’s, straight line like a shark fin in the middle of his chest. “Kinda hated you, earlier.” Mulder tensed for a moment, and Zito licked his jaw quickly, to show that it had passed. “You were doing so well and I was. Not so much. So I, like, removed myself from the situation. Mentally. ‘Cause I didn’t like being like that.”

Mulder took Zito’s arm and held him off, the tender abraded patches under his eyes even starker in the dim light. “Then I got hurt and now you’re all over me again?” he asked, a sliver of anger in his voice.

Shrugging, Zito let his hand fall to hook in the waist of Mulder’s sweats. “Don’t read into things so much. We go back too far to let this temporary headcase shit get in the way.”

There was a very long moment when Mulder only watched him, and Zito flicked his fingers at Mulder’s skin under the fabric. The outside world seemed paved with landmines, and Mulder was so warm, taste of salt in the back of Zito’s throat.

“We go back too far,” Mulder repeated softly.

Zito nodded, stepping into his space. His hand disappeared into Mulder’s sweats, seeing the lines form around Mulder’s mouth, his half-shut eyes.

“Yeah, we do,” Zito agreed, and kissed him, matching him breath for breath.

*

There’s lightning in the sky for a week, but no rain. It makes everybody jittery, off-balance leaning to look out windows. Zito’s no better, his temper short and the sweat on his hands changing the trajectory of his pitches. He can’t do anything to stop it. The night gets cut up into pieces and it takes him along.

He wakes up on the floor of Mulder’s bedroom, the green plastic face of his wristwatch crushed. His mouth feels thick and awkward, his hands sticky. He has no idea how he got here, but the window’s open.

“You up?”

Zito starts, his fisted hands crashing into his chest. He rolls over and Mulder’s leaning over the side of the bed, looking down at him.

“What happened?” he asks, his throat rusty.

Mulder moves down to sit on the floor beside him, his legs folding up like jackknives against his chest, making him look like a kid. His hands twitch as if he wants to touch Zito’s forehead, and Zito doesn’t know why he won’t.

“Nothing. You were drunk. Crazy. Talking about, I don’t know, all sorts of stuff. Then you passed out.”

Zito tries to remember, sleep-fogged, slow roll in his stomach. Lightning jags between the curtains, the ever-opened window. He can picture suddenly the empty glass flask on the shotgun side floor in his car, sees it perfectly with the electricity sparking across in curves.

“Jesus.” He sits up, cradling his head when it tries to spiral away. “Tell me I’m not starting tomorrow.”

Mulder smirks. “Would if I could, babe.”

“Fuck.”

Zito rubs his face hard, presses the heels of his hands down into his eyes. He can’t pitch like this, he needs to go back to sleep, but no hope of that, the lightning is hotwired in him. His heart is beating so fast.

Mulder’s hand falls on his shoulder. “Settle down. It’ll be okay.”

Zito wrenches away from him, smear of anger behind his eyes. “Just because you keep saying that doesn’t make it fucking true, man.”

Looking stupid with his hand held in the air for a moment before he lets it drop, Mulder shows a line of teeth, sneering. “You’ve never seemed to mind before.”

“Things change, all right?” Zito glares at him hotly. “All you ever say is: it’ll be okay. But you don’t know that, and I’m tired of hearing it.”

There’s a low sense of triumph, seeing Mulder’s jaw tighten and hurt slice across his face. Bad things don’t happen to Mulder, and if they do, he never shows it. Zito wants to crow, having finally forced something other than casual affection into Mulder’s expression.

“You should go,” Mulder says, his voice unremarkable. Zito’s eyes widen, not having expected Mulder to give up without a fight. “Obviously I’m not helping you out right now, so. Go home and get some sleep.”

Zito shakes his head. He’ll never sleep again. Everything happens so quickly these days, blink and be unable to pitch, wake up to a new kind of storm, say something without thinking and realize in the aftermath that he has spent four years of his life right here, on the floor next to Mulder.

He stands, shaken. Mulder looks up at him and of course there’s lightning on his face, there’s lightning everywhere. Zito bites his tongue to keep from apologizing, thinking that it isn’t even that bad, Mulder has done worse and Zito has forgiven him.

The hall yawns in front of him. Headrush from standing too fast, from still being drunker than he wants to acknowledge. In the driveway, fumbling for his car door, headlights splash across his body, making him wince and hiss like an animal. Harden pulls up alongside him and turns his car off, the night collapsing back into darkness.

“Hey,” Harden says, getting out and leaning his forearms on the metal. “You leaving?”

Zito jams with energy at the sight of him, cool clear boy who’s barely been around long enough to know any shortcuts, secret ace pitcher who doesn’t give a shit about baseball. Zito grins big, feeling electrocuted and reckless.

“Yeah. Get in.”

Harden doesn’t hesitate. Zito checks Mulder’s window as they pull out, but there’s nothing in there, there never has been.

Harden does him a favor, not bothering with conversation until they get to the bar. Zito learns from the clock in the dash that it’s only eleven, far earlier than he thought. Brief, ill-thought fights while still shivery half-drunk should only be undertaken when it’s closer to dawn. They’ve never really followed a clear map, though.

The bar is crowded. People are hiding from the strange things that are happening in the sky tonight. Harden found a baseball cap in Zito’s glove compartment and now has it pulled down tight over his eyes; he’s unrecognizable.

Standing at the bar, everything thrums and it’s not evident whether the music is too loud or they’re in the middle of an earthquake. Zito is stricken, thinking that there are so many better things about which he could have picked a fight with Mulder.

Harden leans into him, his cold beer tucking into the bend of Zito’s wrist. “If you’re not coming back to our place tonight, you probably want to go easy.”

Zito flinches, shakes his head. “I’m not coming back to your place.”

Harden regards him, saying too quiet to really be heard over the bass, “Then go easy.”

Zito drains half his beer in response, seeing Harden rolling his eyes in his peripheral vision.

“You really take this stuff seriously, huh?” Harden asks. Zito doesn’t know what he’s talking about, if he’s woven together the not very well disguised threads of Mulder and Zito’s existence, or maybe just Zito’s recent failures, which are writ in billboard black and white for everyone to see.

Zito takes the safe road, scratching at the waxy wood bar with his thumbnail. “It is serious. If I get traded-”

“You won’t get traded.”

Zito glares at him, hating his assurance and his hundred-mile-an-hour fastball that will give him the benefit of the doubt long after he’s stopped earning it. “Your faith in me is much appreciated. Shut up.”

Harden moves his shoulders blamelessly, a curved block of shadow on his face from the cap brim. His eyes glitter in there like quartz on the sea floor. They don’t talk for a few minutes, and Zito feels a new buzz gathering atop the old, overlapping gauze.

“What’d Mulder do to you, anyway?”

Zito looks down at his hands on the bar, tattered and dust-printed from Mulder’s windowsill. “Nothing.”

Harden snorts a laugh, plainly knowing all the stuff that Zito hasn’t bothered to keep secret. “Sure.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Zito tells him sharply. “So stop fucking acting like you do.”

Harden makes a dismissive noise, pulling his lower lip through his teeth quickly. “You’re gonna get yourself in so much trouble, you know that?”

Zito swallows. “I actually do know that.”

“Good. Let’s do some shots.”

Things fall apart swiftly after that. Every time Harden slams an empty shot back on the bar, Zito’s ears ring. His throat has been ripped open and Harden is grinning, razor-like with his face tilted up, Zito’s cap stuffed in his back pocket. Harden’s cheeks are nicely flushed, his mouth wet. He takes Zito’s hand and licks salt off the back of it, showing lime-peel teeth. The music keeps getting louder and louder.

And Harden is shouting in his ear, “I got an idea, man, c’mon,” and pulling him through the crowd, back and back and back. Zito twists until his hand closes around Harden’s wrist, terrified of losing him.

Harden stumbles them into the bathroom, and Zito’s confused, slightly less so when Harden pushes him into a stall and follows, clapping the door and it bounces back. Zito instinctively locks it, heat closing up his lungs, making his heart beat off-rhythm. Harden’s so fucking pretty.

He puts a hand on Zito’s chest and keeps him still, looks up at him with his forehead slick. “Does he care?” Harden asks him, rough like he’s already survived his whole life.

Zito whips his head to the side, getting the hair out of his eyes. “Who?”

Harden’s teeth snap as he grins, odd patterns of flight and disaster arching in Zito’s mind. “Mark. Does he care if you screw around?” He drags his hand down Zito’s chest, clipping off buttons, wrinkling silk. “Because I’d really like to fuck you, if that’s okay.”

Zito’s head cracks back against the wall. This got out of control so fast, like the fight he started earlier, like the year he’s had. Mulder has won more games than anyone else, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it.

“He doesn’t care.” Zito wraps his hand up in Harden’s collar, feeling the tequila sear under his skin. He thinks in a panic that Harden doesn’t know about baseball, doesn’t understand what it means for Zito to be reduced to this. “You can do whatever you want to me.”

Harden takes him at his word, suddenly pressed full up on Zito’s body, suddenly kissing him and ripping his shirt open. Zito holds Harden’s face in his hand, drunk for the second time in one night, dimly hoping that he at least makes it to his car this time.

When Harden turns him around, his chest scraped on the dirty wall, Zito is aware of the power at his back, the hundred-mile-an-hour hands on his hips. Graffiti scrawls blackly across his body. Harden bites the back of his neck, flattens Zito’s hands on the stone and flattens his own on top.

Neither of them lasts long; it’s too late in the season. Harden draws blood on Zito’s shoulder, shining on his teeth when he turns Zito back around and kisses him. Zito blinks, fuck-dumb, clutching his jeans with one hand and Harden’s face with the other.

Harden picks him up, puts him back together, finds torn buttons on the floor and pushes them into Zito’s pockets.

They find their way out of the bar like children, holding hands. Harden lets him go when they hit the streetlights, but Zito hangs onto his shoulder, not trusting his own legs. His mind skims, not sure which of all the things that have happened to him tonight is the worst.

Harden takes Zito’s keys and levers him into the shotgun seat. Zito watches in shock as the bleary night lights run like fingerprints across the window, the lightning still tearing at the seams. Harden drives them both into San Francisco, prompting Zito to say with his voice weak:

“You can’t stay at my place.”

Harden glances at him. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

Zito digs his knuckles into the heel of his hand, still tasting blood. “Don’t. Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

“Oh, like I even would,” Harden says, fallover of blue and white and Zito wonders where the cap Harden was wearing is, when he lost it. Zito doesn’t say anything else until they’re in the parking garage under his building, and Harden is counting the money in his wallet, muttering about taxis.

Penned in by concrete walls, Zito fixes his hair with trembling hands, not looking at Harden. Harden touches his face, smoothing his palm across Zito’s cheek.

“Doesn’t care, huh?” Harden says softly. Zito winces, folding his fingers around Harden’s arm and pulling his hand down. Harden’s pulse hums and sings and Zito could be okay with something simple like this, something less damaging than his life so far, but maybe he’s not built that way.

Harden half-smiles, slides his hand out of Zito’s grip. “I’ll see you at the yard, Barry.” He walks away, sucking sticky remnants of salt off the side of his wrist.

Seven hours later, Zito wakes up to knocking at his door, his skull caved in and littered with bone fragments. Zito moans and buries himself under pillows and blankets, insisting that the knocking stop immediately, but he has no control over this kind of thing, or anything really.

Staggering, feeling like he’s been beaten, Zito gets to the door and gets it open and Mulder is there. Zito immediately pulls him inside and puts his arms around him, leaning heavily on Mulder’s chest.

“I’m dying,” he mumbles.

Mulder pushes the hair off his forehead. “You look like shit.”

“I’m _dying_ ,” Zito repeats petulantly. Mulder walks him carefully back into the bedroom, lays him down. A plastic bag rustles, and a bottle of orange juice emerges, a handful of Jolly Ranchers. Zito closes his eyes against the pain.

“I’m so fucking sorry, Mark,” he whispers. Mulder’s hand cards through his hair.

“We’re not gonna talk about baseball anymore,” Mulder tells him evenly. “It’s stupid, I knew you were drunk.”

Zito nods, gouging his nails into his hands, clasped unseen in the curve of his body. He remembers everything, being certain that the world was near its end, and Harden was supposed to be more crippling, he was supposed to leave nothing behind.

“Temporary headcase shit, right?” Mulder says, near his ear so that Zito can feel his breath and the whole surface of his skin is afire. He manages another nod.

They’re like that for a long time, Mulder’s hand moving easily, Zito overrun with regret, thickening his throat, stealing his oxygen. He turns into Mulder, his face against Mulder’s knee.

“I saw you,” Mulder says eventually. “Leaving with Rich.”

Zito freezes, his hand clenching in the sheet. He feels like he might be about to throw up. Harden held him down, fucked him in a bathroom stall, feigned belief in an obvious lie. Zito isn’t sure that he has any memories left that don’t involve Mulder in some way, like his life has been melted down and poured into something new, like he was hammered out of shape in their rookie year and never regained his true form.

Mulder’s fingers touch the bite on Zito’s shoulder, the disordered hook of teeth and bruised skin. He traces it carefully, like it’s a hieroglyph he’s trying to learn by feel. Zito balls his hands up into fists and fits them against his eyes, breathing in shallow terror. He waits for Mulder to ask, demand, what the fuck did you let him do to you. Waits for Mulder to get up and leave without a word, never look at him again.

But Mulder only exhales, long and low, and takes his hand away. Zito chances a look through his fingers and sees Mulder staring at the wall, his clean profile stiff and motionless. Zito’s heart breaks most of the way, and he pushes up, buries his face in the crook of Mulder’s hip. Mulder gasps, his hands pattering on Zito’s shoulders.

Zito opens his mouth on the healed place, Jolly Ranchers crackling under him, and tells him over and over again, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” as the sun rises in busted jail cell bars across their bodies.

*

*

*

2006

His second year in St. Louis, Mulder tapes his fingers together and ignores the pain in his shoulder. There is a vacant lot across the street from the new stadium, a mass grave for two-by-fours and chunked cinderblocks. He’s still learning how to pitch with so little foul ground, the margin for error carved down. It’s gotten to the point where Mulder isn’t even lying when he tells the press that he’s not playing hurt; he can barely feel it.

He sees his own name everywhere, newspapers, posterboard signs, scrolled across people’s backs. This is how it’s always been, but he has trouble connecting it for a few seconds, thinking that the signs refer to some other ballplayer, on some other team. He expects to meet this guy on the street sometime, shake his hand and ask him what he’s doing to get ahead in the count.

At his apartment, Mulder has four T-shirts that used to belong to Zito, two pairs of boxers and a broken watch. He has a steady stream of dates marked off on his calendar, and in the drawer of the nightstand, he has the Oakland A’s season schedule, worn and soft from being handled, tucked in his pocket during road trips.

Hudson says that the National League changes certain things about a person, falling awkwardly off the mound to chase bunts, creepy unfamiliar peace when there are two out and nobody on and the pitcher’s up. Hudson says that the National League has dulled his touch, bettered his eye, hardened the muscles in his sides. Mulder is eaten alive by mosquitoes when the Cardinals go to Atlanta, small red constellations on the backs of his hands.

In the sun-stroked living room of Hudson’s house, toys and colorful rips of construction paper on the floor, they’re drinking beer because neither of them is starting tonight, and Hudson says, “Let’s call the boys.”

Mulder shrugs, swiping his arm across his forehead. “Sure.”

It’s noon on the West Coast, and Mulder talks Hudson out of calling Zito, says he’s probably still in bed. They settle instead on Chavez, who sounds sleeplessly torn, mumbling at each of them in turn. Mulder catches something about Chavez’s arms already hurting, something about rain that won’t fucking stop, and then Hudson is pulling the phone away, laughing his old high-pitched laugh that makes Mulder’s chest ache.

Mulder gets another beer and rests his forehead on the refrigerator for a while, sweating through his shirt. Hudson’s infant son starts to bawl in the back bedroom, and Mulder goes back in, takes the phone from Hudson and watches him disappear down the hall.

“So,” Chavez says, moderately more awake now, clearing his throat.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been throwing junk all week, you know.”

“You’ve been swinging at utter shit,” Mulder retorts lazily, hearing Chavez breathe out a shaky laugh. The phone lines are clear, pinpoint bright between here and there.

“Hudson always sounds exactly the same,” Chavez says after a minute. “Like we’re picking up a conversation from three years ago.”

Mulder yawns, more tired from southeastern travel than he ever was from flying cross-country. When he thinks back, all he ever remembers is flying three thousand miles, as if they never went to Texas, never saw Minnesota.

“Sticking with what works, I guess.”

Chavez snorts. “With the way his season’s starting? He should try something new.”

Mulder checks the hallway, cluttery baby noises. He doesn’t want to talk shit behind Hudson’s back, not when a guest in his house, this drowning city.

“He’ll be all right.”

“And what about you? Throwing all that junk. You planning to keep that up?”

Pressing his fingers into his eye, Mulder sighs. “I’m fine, Chavvy.”

Though Chavez is being irritating and combative, Mulder misses him dearly. Chavez has a newborn too, and he’s probably not getting much sleep. The marks under his eyes dig in so deep, visible on television, visible from space. Mulder still remembers Chavez best the way he was when he went insane, years ago.

“When are you coming to San Francisco?” Chavez asks abruptly.

Mulder blinks and thinks for a second. “Sometime in May, I think.”

“Well, great. I’ll just set aside the whole fucking month, then.”

“Excuse me for not having the schedule fucking memorized.”

But he knows what Chavez is trying to figure out and though he can’t tell him where the Cardinals will be, he knows that May goes like this for the A’s: angels-indians-devilrays-bluejays-yankees-mariners-giants-whitesox-royals-rangers. He knows this without even looking at the schedule in his pocket, a kind of terrible thing like every text message Zito’s sent him saved in his phone.

Chavez exhales heavily into the phone. “Anyway. I’ll see you when I see you. You’re gonna come hang out when you’re in town, right?”

Mulder squints one eye closed, fucking up his depth perception. “I don’t know, man, maybe.”

Last year, his first year gone, the Cardinals had gone to San Francisco once, in July, and Mulder wore a straight line between the ballpark and the hotel, ignoring the phone calls from his old teammates, shielded by the fog. A half a mile from Zito’s apartment building, Mulder had drunk himself asleep for three nights straight, doing his very best to stay in one place.

“You suck,” Chavez tells him mildly.

“You wish,” Mulder says back, and Chavez snorts again. They’re too far apart now for anything that happened four years ago to do them any damage. Mulder wonders sometimes if his life would be any different if he’d slept with Chavez back then.

“Whatever. Go back to hanging out with the enemy.”

“Huddy?”

“ _Enemy_.”

Mulder kinda smiles, wishing he could be there to see Chavez’s clawed-out eyes, the stilted way he moves when he’s playing through pain, which is most of the time. Chavez never says anything, but Mulder can tell by the way his throws get to first on the bounce, the scuffed edge of his voice.

“You guys play tonight?” Mulder asks, already knowing the answer. Chavez makes an affirmative noise. “You should go back to sleep, then.”

“Can’t tell me what to do anymore, you’re not even here.”

Mulder rolls his eyes. “Like you ever listened to me when I was.”

“Ah, fuck you. Being in first place all the time has fucked you up something awful.”

“You think?”

Chavez’s jaw clicks as he yawns, the distance between shrinking down until Mulder would swear they’re in the same room. “Yeah. It’s not natural.”

Mulder remembers that, coming from behind every mid-summer. Like it meant something more that way, like they paid for it in blood. It’s one of the many things that he is surprised to find himself missing.

“Well,” he says, and then nothing else.

“Fine,” Chavez says. “Go’n and be in first place. I’ll see you in May, whether you want to or not. Quit throwing junk.”

“Quit swinging at it.”

“I’ll tell Zito you said hi,” and that’s a fantastically cruel thing to say, making Mulder think that maybe the distance between them is not as far as he figured.

Mulder bites the inside of his cheek. “You do that.”

Chavez laughs, hangs up without saying goodbye.

Mulder wastes some time staring at his hands, the mosquito bites and dirty black strings from pulled-off tape still circling his fingers. The windows are so clean that Mulder’s not certain they’re not open, and they face west, but they don’t show anything that he wants to see.

*

2004

In December, Zito holed up in Mulder’s house in Scottsdale and didn’t see the sun for days at a time.

It wasn’t like they had anything to do. Zito was asleep on the couch when Mulder got back from playing golf, his hair falling over his arm. Zito ate breakfast standing, crushed up soda cans with his hands, watched ESPN obsessively, and wanted to have sex with Mulder all the time.

Here in the off-season, it wasn’t hard to understand Zito, who lived in fear of being traded, still working for Mulder’s forgiveness after whatever had happened with Harden in the middle of the summer. Zito put his mouth to good use. Pinned Mulder to the door as soon as he came in. The knees of his jeans were worn out, the marks on his back still fresh when they were overlaid with new ones. Zito lost his gag reflex and Mulder couldn’t be in the same room with him without getting at least half-hard.

All things considered, Mulder didn’t bother telling Zito that he’d already been forgiven. Or, more to the point, that the transgression was better assumed to be so slight and inconsequential as to not even warrant absolution. In the grand scheme of things that Zito had done, letting Rich Harden fuck him was way, way down on the list. Mulder had decided that in a single moment, with Zito’s torn skin under his fingers and Harden’s cologne scented on his skin, and Mulder wasn’t the type of person who changed his opinions about things.

They heard over and over again how very likely it was that Zito would be traded this winter. How it was practically inevitable. Zito held onto him, his face against Mulder’s back. Every time his phone rang, he twitched so hard he broke water glasses. But it was never Billy Beane, and the days went by.

Mulder went out alone at night, meeting up with Chavez or someone else; half the major leagues lived in the Phoenix area in the off-season, and he had no shortage of friends. He accepted that Zito wouldn’t come with him, knowing it would be difficult to explain his presence down here, a killing dry stretch of desert away from his family and his house in Hollywood. The possibility of detection wasn’t the only thing that kept Zito so fully penned in by the walls, but it was a good enough excuse.

Over the course of the night, Mulder’s paper money migrated from his wallet to his front pocket, his coins into the crack of the car seat. He got back and Zito’s hands dug into his pants, tore soft ten-dollar bills, ruined money under them like the best dream when he fucked Zito on the couch.

Mulder couldn’t even tell him not to worry, alight with the memory of the last time he’d tried that. He took what he could get, tried not to wake Zito when he came in at three in the morning with his head already smeared by hangover.

They were on the couch, a Thursday, and Mulder asked him, “Are you going home for the holidays again?”

Zito shrugged, sitting back against the arm of the couch with his legs crossing Mulder’s like swords. Staying inside all the time had leeched him of color, sunk his eyes back. “Yeah, I guess.”

It was a dumb question. Zito always went home for the holidays, and he always came back after. Mulder was short of conversation, though, Zito’s eyes locked on the television, the long rumpled line of his body laid out for Mulder to see with diminishing perspective, like railroad tracks meeting on the horizon.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he said, surprising himself. Zito glanced at him, vague intrigue skating across the constant worry on his face.

“Shouldn’t go home?” Zito asked in confusion.

Mulder let one arm rest casually on Zito’s leg, cupping his kneecap. “What if something happens? I mean, over Christmas. You should be here if something happens.”

“It’s not gonna make a difference where I am when it happens,” Zito said flatly, his face still turned away from Mulder, the familiar red and burnt yellow of ESPN on his newly pale skin.

It took Mulder a second to realize that Zito had said when, not if.

“Hey.” He tightened his grip on Zito’s knee, feeling the cap shift and notch back into place. “I’m just saying, like, in the event of. It’s all real hypothetical.”

Zito half-smiled, one hand buried in his hair. “In the hypothetical event of me getting traded, you think you’ll be able to do something about it if I’m here?”

Mulder scowled at the television. “That is not what I said.”

“Well, clarify yourself, by all means.”

Impending doom made Zito snarky. Mulder considered shutting him up in the old-fashioned way, already regretting this conversation. Basketball players flickered and flew across the screen, but they weren’t watching the game, only the steady scroll at the bottom. Waiting for it to light up bright red with breaking news.

“If something happens, if you’re here, maybe it’ll be easier to deal with.”

Even while saying it, Mulder knew it was bullshit. Zito had been maintaining a very thin veneer of sanity for two years now. Mulder used to be a good counterweight, keeping Zito in one place, keeping him from getting too far inside his own mind, but he’d lost it somewhere along the way, in between Zito winning the Cy Young and Mulder not sleeping with Eric Chavez and Mulder getting hurt and Zito fucking Rich Harden. Nothing was the same as it had been when they were in their first year. Mulder couldn’t be responsible for this anymore.

Zito sat halfway up, leaning back on his elbows on the arm of the couch. He looked at Mulder, eyes dark as a forest fire. “I don’t think you get exactly how bad this is gonna be. It’s not gonna be an issue of dealing with it. It’s more like, how long can I stay above water. How long can I hide being totally fucking destroyed.”

Blinking at him, Mulder shook his head automatically, maybe lying as he answered, “It won’t be like that. You’ll be okay somewhere else. It’s still baseball.”

“Jesus, Mark, baseball’s got nothing to do with it.”

Mulder was gonna ask him what the fuck that meant, but Zito’s phone rang.

Zito’s leg tensed under Mulder’s hand, and Mulder tensed too, pressing hard on Zito’s kneecap and hearing Zito hiss between his teeth. They both stared for a second at Zito’s phone on the coffee table and Mulder had the wild urge to grab it before Zito could, four-seam it through the window. Take his five-iron to the television and deadbolt the doors, draw the curtains. If Zito was gone, Mulder didn’t want to know about it.

He held back. Zito picked up his phone and looked at the screen, his forehead clearing immediately and Mulder sighed. “It’s Huddy,” Zito said, rolling his eyes a little at their anxiety.

He stood up to take the call, and Mulder watched him as he moved, the strangest thing that had ever happened to him, here with Zito through another fearful winter, arguing against going home for Christmas because terrible things would happen if Mulder let him out of his sight, worse than a broken hip, worse than betrayal.

Zito’s voice rose. He said three times, “What?” and spun to stare at Mulder with huge windstruck eyes. Mulder felt adrenaline curl bitter and hot in his stomach, but then Zito said, “What the fuck do you mean, Atlanta?”

And something gave in Mulder’s chest.

It wasn’t Zito. It was Hudson the whole time.

He started to laugh, bending over his legs and holding his head in his hands. Zito thwapped him on the top of his head, brokenly comforting Hudson by saying, “Dude, dude,” and Mulder knew if he looked up, he’d see Zito’s fierce outraged gaze. Zito was gonna kill him for taking this lightly, for laughing, but Mulder didn’t care.

He could see then, for a moment, that losing Zito was not something he would have survived. In the clarity of released pressure, the sudden shock of their next season slamming into his mind, Mulder could see everything.

Lifting his head, his eyes wet from laughing too hard, Mulder found Zito at the window, his back to the room. With the sunlight behind him and the red ticker on the television bursting into life with Hudson’s name, Zito was form without depth, a solid black shadow, his watercolor reflection wavering in the glass.

Later, an hour or two, Zito decided to go see Hudson. “Somebody should be there,” Zito told Mulder, shoving shirts and jeans into a backpack.

“He’s got a wife,” Mulder pointed out, leaning in the doorframe, two years’ weight removed from his back. He wanted to laugh again, wanted to howl with it.

Zito glared at him. “Thank you. I’m still going. He’ll need someone to take him out drinking.” He looked at the shirt in his hand. “This isn’t mine.” He packed it anyway, and Mulder didn’t say anything, liking the idea of Zito driving across the country wearing Mulder’s shirt. Zito was driving because driving meant more.

“Just for a couple days, right?”

“Yeah.” Zito went into the bathroom and came back out with his toothbrush sticking out of his pocket. He shouldered his bag and came to Mulder, pressing him down and kissing him hard, Mulder’s head tocking back against the doorframe. Zito licked his way into Mulder’s mouth and pushed his knee between Mulder’s legs, and Mulder slipped a hand into Zito’s hair.

He broke with a gasp and rolled his forehead on Zito’s temple. Zito’s fingers were in his belt. Mulder could taste him bright as pennies, fractured and thinking that when Zito got back, they’d be able to take their time, abandon desperation at last. They both had two more years until free agency, and it opened him up, so much time still before them.

He kissed Zito’s cheek, feeling stupid and also blown away. “Thank God it wasn’t you,” he said.

Zito smiled at him, guilty relief crowding into his face. “Yeah.” He stepped away, pushing his hair back. It hurt to look at him, white-light young and at peace in an indefinable way, something that Mulder had not seen in him for years. “I’ll call you from the road.”

Then Mulder was watching his back again, and then Zito was gone.

*

By the time Mulder finally gets to San Francisco, the rain has stopped. People are beginning to lose their suspension of disbelief when he tells them he’s not hurt. The city comes at him like vengeance, same sidewalks and street corners and second-gear grades. The wind off the bay is strong enough to pull him into brick walls.

Mulder isn’t sure where Zito’s living this year, and for that he’s thankful. He doesn’t think he’d be okay if he had to stay a half a mile away again. He ends up wandering the business district when he can’t sleep, late late at night, black glass office buildings and accordion metal doors closing up the storefronts. It’s rained more in the past four months than anyone could have expected, and everyone is sick, surfaces slick and unforgiving.

It’s only because he starts tomorrow that he’s not drinking. Even that is hard to remember. He’d give anything—but he shakes his head, shakes that off.

They lose to the Giants the next day, but it’s not really his fault. Mulder ices his shoulder and there’s a message on his phone, Eric Chavez saying come over here or we’ll come get you.

Mulder knows them pretty well, knows that they will cross the water without hesitation, and he can imagine few things worse than seeing Chavez and Zito in front of his new team, his team that isn’t new anymore, second season. He is counting the days until the moment when he will have played for another team longer than he played for the A’s, the kind of thing that breaks a person.

He takes a cab over to the East Bay, meets Chavez in the parking lot of a bar. Chavez is talking on his phone, clasping Mulder’s hand briefly in greeting, pulling him close to bump chests, stupid half-hug.

Mulder stands there watching the streetlights fuzz like high pop-ups until Chavez stops being fucking rude and ends the call.

“Well,” Chavez says, studying him. Mulder nods, recognizing the bruise-colored night hills better than anything else he has seen all season, including San Francisco, including Eric Chavez. “You made it.”

“Apparently I didn’t have a choice,” Mulder answers. He searches Chavez for some evidence of the early year, the way Chavez has finally beaten his tendency to start slow, but there’s nothing there except the tight corners of Chavez’s eyes. “Are they inside?”

Chavez shakes his head. “Moved on. Went back to Walnut Creek.”

“What’s in Walnut Creek?”

“Shit.” Chavez’s expression contorts for a minute. “Keep forgetting you aren’t here. Anyway. Richie and Huston and Swisher and Joe. They’ve got a house.”

The living together is something that Mulder and Chavez started. Way the hell back in ’02, after Chavez got divorced and crashed on the couch and decided not to leave, no matter how skin-crawling awkward it was in the aftermath. Mulder wanted there to be noise when he got home, always wanted a rookie on hand to run his errands for him.

It never occurred to him to live with Zito during the season, because Zito wouldn’t leave the city and Mulder hated the fog. Though they spent most of every winter together, sometimes baseball took priority. Sometimes Mulder needed to be somewhere where Zito wasn’t, so he could catch his breath and figure out how to sleep alone again.

He turns his mind away from that.

“Okay, well,” he says, tipping his head to the side. Chavez unlocks the car and Mulder moves the seat all the way back, his knees still against the glove compartment. He lets them get five miles down the road before he asks:

“Who else is gonna be there?” trying his level best to sound casual.

Chavez darts a look at him, a red-white striped peppermint caught between his teeth as he smiles, looking vaguely demonic.

“Everyone.”

Mulder swallows, looking out the window. Twisted brush and yellow-eyed animals flash past. He hears Chavez rattling his hands on the wheel.

“I probably won’t stay very long,” Mulder hedges. “I mean, I pitched today, you know? I’m kinda tired.”

Chavez snorts. “Dude, he’s not, like, gonna do anything. You shoulda seen him when I said you were coming out tonight, fucking ghost-pale, man, like he got hit or something, and-”

“Eric,” Mulder says quietly. “Shut the fuck up.”

Chavez mostly does, muttering under his breath not loud enough for Mulder to hear. They go through the tunnel and Mulder watches the perfect arches of headlights streaming across the curved white tile walls. He wishes he’d stayed in San Francisco. He has three rules for getting through the day, and the first two involve not being within earshot of Barry Zito. The third involves not thinking about the first two.

But they’re here now, big rambling two-story house glowing gold and submerged in trees, a steep rise at its back, shiny-new black cars cluttering the driveway like toys. Mulder knew Swisher and Blanton for a month in his last season, but he never met Huston Street, only saw him pitch last year with his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth and his supernaturally pretty face.

He’s lost track of who’s come and gone from the team, knows only that everyone is waiting for Zito to be traded again. Mulder doesn’t believe it. After that terrible three-day stretch two Decembers ago, he is certain that Zito will never have to leave Oakland.

Chavez gets out of the car, but Mulder stays for a minute gathering his strength. Chavez comes over to his side and reaches into his inside coat pocket, sliding out a silver flask and passing it to Mulder through the open window.

Mulder gives him a pitifully grateful look and knocks back two quick shots. Courage blooms in his stomach.

Inside, there is light and motion and noise. Guys he knows and guys he doesn’t funnel through the hallway, laughing on their way to the kitchen or the living room. Mark Ellis shouts at the sight of him. Bobby Crosby tackles him into the wall, hugging him so tight Mulder sees stars. A beer magically appears in his hand.

They ask him how’s it going, and Mulder shrugs, smiling. They want stories about playing for the pennant and running away with the division. Mulder fakes his way through it, not remembering much about the past year and a half. He knows the numbers, but not what the old stadium looked like creaking and jammed to the rafters in October.

In the living room, he is surprised to find Noah Lowry, who will start the last game of the series for the Giants, sitting next to the man Mulder got traded for, tall black-haired kid with heavy eyebrows and his arm around Lowry’s shoulders. Nick Swisher is standing on a chair in the kitchen, holding court with salt scraped on his face, his wrist taped up. Street and Rich Harden are flicking bottle caps at each other across the counter, their faces whiskey-flushed.

It’s much like Mulder left it, like a million other nights in dozens of other houses. He drinks as fast as his stomach can stand, keeps his back to the wall, not wanting to be caught off-guard when Zito finally appears. He’s wicked with apprehension, digging his nails into the inside of his wrist.

An hour passes, or maybe two, and Mulder is more than a little drunk and more than a little relieved, because it would seem that Zito is smarter than him and decided not to show. Mulder thinks he needs to do what he can not to end the night passed out on the floor, needs to get out of the East Bay still intact.

He’s sitting on the carpeted stairs, shoeprints under his hand, watching the people flow and fade, uneven party tide. Half in darkness, he sees Zito for a second in the short gap between the kitchen and the living room. Thin and whitewashed, his hair longer than it has been since they were in Cape Cod. Mulder drops his head into his hands, scrubbing at his eyes. His luck is shit, always has been. And Zito’s an idiot, they both are, what were they thinking, being here at the same time?

He considers leaving, but Chavez would never let him hear the end of it. He considers in disgust that he is not nearly the man he once was, miles away from what he should be.

Zito emerges, his eyes darting nervously but not alighting on Mulder, halfway up the stairs and bisected by shadow. Mulder thinks, fuck it, and says hoarsely, “Hey.”

Zito jerks, his wide eyes flying to Mulder and his mouth is popped open a little and Mulder can’t look at him like that, memory like an endless deck of cards shuffling in his mind. Zito on his knees, Zito on his back, Zito on top of him with his knees against Mulder’s sides. His hands on Mulder’s shoulders, his wet-open mouth. Zito hanging half-off the couch with his hands braced on the floor, his face flushing and his teeth piercing his lower lip.

“How long have you been here?” Mulder asks him, wiping his mind clean. It’s not important. It isn’t worth the ragged inside of his cheek, the blood in his mouth.

Staring at the floor, Zito shrugs. “Not too long. I didn’t. I thought maybe you were already gone.”

They’re quiet for a minute, Mulder above Zito, the light parting them like a sea. Mulder wants to touch him very badly, but he hangs onto his knees, clears his throat.

“How’ve you been?” he asks.

Zito looks at him, black-eyed and seriously in pain, worse than Mulder’s shoulder, worse than six-run first innings and giving up five home runs. “How the fuck do you think I’ve been?”

Mulder closes his eyes, his hands on his face, fingers pressing hard into his temple. “Come up here for a second,” he whispers.

He doesn’t think Zito will. Zito wouldn’t return his calls last year, changed his email address so that everything Mulder tried to tell him bounced back. Zito has been twice-removed, stories about him filtering through Tim Hudson and Eric Chavez, just another opposing player, an American Leaguer who has no impact on Mulder’s day-to-day existence. It wasn’t until September that Mulder heard from him, on the night the Cardinals clinched the division, and by then Mulder was mostly ash, anyway.

But this is Zito’s fault, for once and for sure. He rises, sits next to Mulder on the stair. Their knees bump, Zito holding onto his elbows. His hair slices across his face. Mulder tries to remember how it used to be, the ease of it, Zito always just there.

“It’s good to see you again,” he says uselessly.

“Yeah. You too.”

“You’ve been pitching real well.”

“Yeah.”

Zito is silent, staring straight ahead. Mulder searches for something else to say, something normal about the party or Chavez lying drunk on the patio, something about the dead weather. It was okay for Zito to ignore him for so long, Mulder knows that. It was the only way they were going to get over it. They still don’t really talk.

“Listen-”

“This is stupid,” Zito says suddenly, cutting him off. He turns to Mulder with a look of stunned panic on his face. “I can’t, Mark, I can’t, like, be around you. I’m sorry.”

He stands too quick and loses his balance, he almost falls. Mulder moves by instinct, catching his belt and holding him steady. There’s a perfect moment then, with Mulder’s hand in Zito’s belt and Zito’s weight precariously balanced, tipping away from him. Mulder can feel two inches of skin, a smooth heated place that he remembers so well.

Zito steps down and Mulder lets go. At the bottom of the stairs, Zito looks back up at him with naked despair.

“It’ll get better,” Zito tells him helplessly. “It’s got to.”

He disappears, tangled wreck of hair over his back collar, his shoulders trembling.

It’s been a year and a half. If it was gonna get better, it would have already. Mulder drives his thumbs into his eyes, breathing shallowly and swearing that when he hunts down the vampire that did this to them, he’ll rip out its heart with his hands.

*

So Zito was gone, speeding east on empty highways. Mulder talked to the press and he talked to their teammates, brave new world. Everyone wanted to know what it would be like. Mulder knew they would go one-two when the season began again, Harden behind them and from there it wasn’t certain. But one-two, as they’d never been, Mulder could feel the potential of it strum like metal in his bloodstream.

He hid all of Zito’s stuff in the garage and had some friends over, thinking about Zito in the wasteland, red dust on his arms. Smiling without pain, Mulder played videogames like dancing, lifted his glass to the coming season. The other guys were ballplayers too, and they gave him askance looks, remarked that he seemed to be taking the Hudson news pretty fucking well.

Mulder shrugged, no sense dwelling on the past, no sense missing someone when you couldn’t get him back. Zito was a ghost in the corners, laughing when Mulder laughed, touching the back of his neck, turning the alarm clock off and mumbling, _fuck it, back to sleep,_ with his cold face on Mulder’s chest.

He hadn’t realized, absorbed as he was by pitching and then by the strain of keeping Zito from going completely off the deep end, but there had been something strung tight in him for a very long time now, waiting for Zito to be traded, crossing his fingers when he turned on the television in the morning. It was like being cut free.

Zito called from West Texas, chattery wind behind his voice. Mulder could picture him, leaning on the bumper of his car with his hood up, the skin of his face bitten and chill. Nothing exciting happened on the road, Zito half-asleep and averaging ninety miles an hour.

Zito said, “I don’t want to talk to the press, dude.”

“Then don’t.” Mulder slumped down in the chair, one hand under his shirt.

“It’s like, what the fuck am I supposed to say? Oh, it’s such a goddamn shame, Huddy’s so fucking good, but hey, at least I don’t have to leave. You know? It’d be all, like, mixed messages.”

Mulder opened his belt, not really intending anything, just seemed like the thing to do. “If you don’t know what to say, don’t worry about it. Don’t answer the phone if you don’t know the number. Chavvy’s talking enough for the rest of us, anyway.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? He’s acting like Billy did it specifically to piss him off.”

“You mean the world doesn’t actually revolve around Eric Chavez? Blasphemy.” Zito snickered, and Mulder pushed his hand into his jeans, closing his eyes. “Are you stopped for the night?”

“Think so. I, see. There’s fucking _nothing_ out here.” Zito sounded amazed, and Mulder hummed, pushing up into his hand. He wanted Zito back, atom-bomb blast of light and a blown tire, anything that would put them in the same place again.

Zito was halfway there, though. They talked for a little while longer and Mulder didn’t let on that he was casually jerking off, kept his voice low. There was nothing for it.

Eventually, Zito yawned and said he was gonna go find someplace to sleep. Mulder said okay, not really paying that much attention, heat low in his stomach.

“You know something,” Zito said thoughtfully. “I kinda already miss you. That’s weird, right?”

Mulder sucked in a breath between his teeth, his hand moving faster. “Little bit. But it’s okay.”

Zito laughed. “Someday the world’s gonna end and you’re gonna tell me that it’s okay.”

Grinning hard against his will, Mulder bowed his head. They were so much better now, with injury and rumor far away, only physical space separating them. Mulder’s tendency to simplify and Zito’s tendency to overthink at last matched up perfectly. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

Mulder awoke the next day on Zito’s side of the bed. The sun was noon-high, wet yellow light washing over his back. He spent some time getting Zito’s stuff out of the garage, replacing everything so that Zito would never even know it’d been moved. He cleaned the windows and changed his shirt, set his watch to East Coast time.

That night, he met up with some other team’s second baseman to go see a basketball game. Sometime in the third quarter, he got a call from Billy Beane.

Things slowed down at that point.

Mulder found himself back at his house, standing in the dark driveway. His phone hadn’t stopped ringing. His hands were shaking, the moon so heavy and white above him. He prayed for rain, anything that could wake him up out of this, affirm that it wasn’t real, he hadn’t been traded.

He’d been traded.

All he could think to do was fight through the reporters’ calls, ten-times greater disbelief and the rip down the heart of him. He forced his hands to work, narrowing his eyes at the green light of his phone. A signal flare, satellite cry, reaching east to wherever Zito was now, but Zito’s phone rang through to voicemail and Mulder didn’t even know if he’d heard yet.

Inside, he tripped over one of Zito’s sneakers, and broke. He fell to his knees, his mind sick-lit and astonished. It wasn’t possible. They’d only had two days, not nearly what they were promised, and Zito hadn’t even been there.

Mulder was still in the hallway fourteen hours later, when Zito got back.

Zito crashed in, splintering the door against the wall. Wild like that, deep gaping eyes and breathing so hard, jagged in the quiet. He could see in the dark, he skidded to a stop before Mulder and stared down at him. Mulder stared up, his mouth half-open. Fourteen hours and it hadn’t stopped being true. Mulder wasn’t sure if he’d slept.

Zito reached down and grabbed Mulder’s shirt, hauled him to his feet and slammed him against the wall. The horseshoe over the door for luck tumbled off its nail, cracked the floorboards.

“No,” Zito said, and pulled him up, slammed him back again. Mulder lost his breath, his head spinning. Zito’s hands so tight on his shoulders, knuckles gouging and Mulder had never seen him like this. Zito had always gone crazy with more style.

“No,” he said again, his voice breaking. Mulder shook his head, coughing to get his wind back. Zito wrenched Mulder’s shirt up and banged his forehead on Mulder’s chest. His hands spread wide on Mulder’s stomach. Mulder folded his fingers on the sides of Zito’s neck, feeling the dive of Zito’s heartbeat.

Zito kissed him or he kissed Zito and it didn’t matter. The force of it split Zito’s lip. Zito snarled with blood on his teeth and jerked Mulder’s belt open. Mulder’s hand twisted in his hair and pulled his head back, licking Zito’s throat and sucking hard like he could swallow Zito’s pulse and keep it from moving so fast.

Zito’s hand was in his shorts and Mulder buried his face in Zito’s shoulder, breathing in shudders and rags. When Zito roughly flipped him to face the wall, Mulder let him, tasting plaster and dirt and hearing Zito say against the back of his neck, over and over again, no.

Mulder pressed his forehead into the wall, couldn’t regain control. Zito had a fist clenched in his shirt, hiked up to above his shoulder blades. His mouth was metal-hot against Mulder’s back, his belt buckle cold as hell on Mulder’s bared hip.

They’d been experimenting with violence all winter, but nothing like this.

And Zito fucked him there in the hallway where Mulder had sat without moving for too long. Zito had seared through fourteen hundred miles to be here now. Slick-hard and painful at Mulder’s back, dragging him so close, until he was imprinted on the wall, gasping out pieces of his lungs. Until Zito was everything in and on and above, and nothing had changed.

They collapsed together onto the floor at the end of it, their faces shining. Zito’s elbow clocked into Mulder’s eye and it began to swell immediately. The ceiling swam overhead, Zito’s arms around him and Zito still saying no, shivering with no oxygen left inside him. He said it until his voice was gone, until Mulder covered Zito’s mouth with his hand and begged him to shut up.

*

In June, Mulder gives up and lets the team put him on the disabled list.

He’s certain he’s not actually hurt, but everyone wants a reason for why he’s pitching as badly as he is, and this seems to make them happy. The doctors fake their diagnosis. They smudge his X-rays with thumbprints and shoot him full of magnetic pulses, until coins stick to his fingers. In front of the press, they talk about his rotator cuff in dour terms, and Mulder sits exhausted behind them, staring into the flashbulbs.

They send him back to Arizona, a week to get prodded by orthopedic surgeons and Mulder comes home to sheet-covered furniture, phantom handprints on the wall in the front hallway. He sleeps for two days and it’s deeply weird to be down here in the middle of summer.

The pain in his shoulder is insubstantial and nothing that should have fucked up his delivery. He can’t come over three-quarters anymore, he gives everything away. The doctors are resolute in their opinion that he is damaged, and Mulder doesn’t even bother to argue.

This has happened once before, in the last half of his last season in Oakland, when he was an enrapt spectator watching Zito fragment, not noticing that he was in pieces himself until they sat him down and showed him the box scores. But this isn’t like that.

Television fills up his days and when he tries to lift a case of beer out of his car, his left arm buckles and the case crashes onto the driveway, silver-blue cans rolling down into the street.

Before the first week is out, he gets a call from Zito’s number.

Mulder is not expecting it. Zito is smarter than he is, dodging Mulder’s calls last year, running away from him on the stairs last month. Mulder keeps thinking that he’s tough enough to talk to Zito without revealing anything, claw all the way back to their brief Cape Cod friendship, nine years finished now.

He answers hesitantly, and it’s not Zito at all, it’s Eric Byrnes.

“Fuckin’ christ _hell_ , Mark, what the fuck are you doing in Phoenix without fucking calling me?”

Mulder doesn’t say anything, stunned.

Zito’s voice rises from behind Byrnes’s. “Dude, who the fuck told you you could use my phone?”

Mulder flinches. He almost hangs up, but Byrnes is saying, “Reuniting, baby. It’s been too long.”

He’s not sure which of them Byrnes is talking to, but Zito asks, muffled and suddenly scared, “Who are you talking to?”

“Here,” Byrnes says, and there’s a shuffle as the phone is passed off. Zito’s fearful breath falls into Mulder’s ear, and he closes his eyes.

“Hey,” Mulder says low.

“Oh. I. I didn’t know he was calling you.”

“Yeah, well.” Mulder swallows, hating beyond all reason the circumstance, the bloody shred of years behind them. “I’m in Scottsdale, you know. For my arm.”

“I heard.” Zito’s throat clicks. “We’re here too. For interleague, you know? And Eric’s a little bitch.”

Byrnes cries out in offense, and there’s a tussle, rained curses and Mulder blinks at the TV without seeing it, only light twitching like muscles on the surface of his eyes. Byrnes regains the phone.

“Come out tonight,” he implores.

Mulder shakes his head. “Can’t.”

“Fuck that. Like you’ve got such a packed social life. Like you’re not fucking dying to see me.” Byrnes thwacks something, yelping. “Would you get your fucking hands off me, Barry, mother _fuck_.”

Mulder is thrown right back to six years ago, when they were all brand-new and Byrnes came up for ten games late in the season, amusing everyone with his ability to fit every sentence with at least one swear word. He remembers Zito laughing hard and pushing a bar of white hotel soap into Byrnes’s mouth while he slept.

“Put Zito back on, will you,” Mulder says, his throat dry.

Byrnes mutters and then Zito’s back, quietly saying hi.

“He wants me to come see you guys,” Mulder tells him.

“Yeah.” Zito sounds pretty wrecked, and if this is what he saved Mulder from hearing last year, then thank god.

“Is that a. A good idea?” Mulder crosses his fingers, although that particular talisman never did them any good, because maybe cabin fever has snuck into his mind and maybe it’s been a month since he’s seen Zito. Maybe they can get through this, just one night. Somewhere, they were once friends.

“Of course it isn’t, Mark,” Zito says, tattered edge of impatience. He pauses. “But you can. If you want.”

Mulder rubs his face, drained beyond tolerance. “Maybe I will then.”

But he knows he won’t go.

Zito says okay, names the bar where they’ll be, and then clicks off, and Mulder rubs his shoulder absentmindedly, dense heat behind his eyes and he didn’t promise anything. Neither of them ever said anything irrevocable, disregarding that one terrible day when they’d woken up battered into the new morning, no longer teammates, no longer anything that could be claimed. Mulder prefers to believe that nothing happened that bad day a half a week before Christmas, a year and a half ago. He prefers to believe that they’d just packed up Zito’s stuff and left each other painlessly, moving away in different directions across the desert.

He won’t go because he can’t do that to himself, he knows pretty well. And he didn’t lie, he never lied.

He passes the night like every night since he’s been down here, draining beers, the television muted so he can hear the buzz of crickets outside, paying no attention to his phone when it rings. He keeps thinking that all he needs is time, needs to stop seeing Zito crumpled in the front hallway with his lip bleeding.

Zito knocks on his window late, after Mulder has stopped watching the clock. Mulder is sure that he’s just vapor, staggering over and flipping the latch, the window squealing as it’s jerked up. Zito is swaying, looking appropriately ethereal, better-forgotten memory, all circled eyes and hollowed cheeks.

“You didn’t come,” Zito says, but not in accusation, more like how he’d say, the sky is blue. The weather is impossible. We are no longer on the same team.

“I only said maybe,” Mulder answers, wanting to reach through the window and touch Zito, confirm that he’s really there.

“You could have. I would have been okay.” Zito’s eyes alight on him and Mulder catches his breath.

“You would have been the only one. Come on.” Mulder offers his hand and Zito clasps it without a second thought, using it to pull himself through the window. Taking his weight, Mulder’s shoulder fires with pain and he sucks in air between his teeth, astonished by it.

“Fuck, your arm,” Zito says clumsily, letting him go at once. “I’m sorry, I forgot.”

Mulder shakes his head, gritting his teeth. “It doesn’t hurt. I’m not really. They’re making it all up.” He collapses, his knees hitting the carpet with an echoed thump. His arm feels like it’s been ripped out of the socket. Zito kneels beside him, worried hands on Mulder’s back and Mulder shuts his eyes tight, concentrating on that to the exclusion of all else.

“Jesus, Mark, be careful.” Zito’s hands curl around his shoulder, nice warmth there and the agony recedes slightly. Mulder can breathe again.

“Why are you here?” he asks, glancing at Zito and Zito’s very near to him, kneeling together on the floor.

Zito leans back on his heels, defensive with his shoulders drawn up. “You didn’t come,” he repeats, and Mulder hears the blur in his voice, the damp fingerprints on his collar. Zito’s drunk. They’re exactly like they always have been, someone always off-balance, someone always holding the other up. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

But Zito’s not telling the truth, his eyes flickering with doubt. Mulder puts his hand on Zito’s neck for a moment, sluggish drunken thud of his heartbeat, warm skin, two days stubble.

“I’ve known you for nine years,” he says, treacherous life that he’s leading. “Don’t you think I can tell when you’re lying?”

Zito’s eyes widen, and he closes his fingers on Mulder’s wrist. He shakes his head. “It hasn’t been nine years,” he whispers. “It’s just been broken up over time.”

And he lets Mulder’s hand fall, the distance returning full-force between them. Mulder is left in unbelievable pain, wondering if the reason he hasn’t had faith in his injury to this point is because it’s the least important thing that has gone wrong with him.

Zito’s throat moves as he swallows, looking away. “I don’t know why I came over here,” he says, distracted by the silent blue-chattering television. “I thought maybe you’d come out and maybe we could. I don’t know. I should go.”

He stands, Mulder on his knees and they’ve been here before. Mulder instinctively begins to reach for Zito’s belt, stopping himself forcefully. They’re going in circles. Tomorrow Mulder will wake up and be back on that raft in Cape Cod where Zito set them in motion, set them up to fall. Tomorrow he will mistake Zito from afar, not realizing that he already knows him.

“Hang on.” Mulder gets to his feet with some trouble, balancing with a hand on the wall. Zito is backed up against the window, skittish like a beaten animal. “We’ve got to, like. We can’t keep this up forever.”

Zito smiles, his face angled down. “Why not? We never see each other.”

That might be part of the problem, but Mulder might be drunk. It used to be so _easy_ , and he can’t for the life of him get over that. He scrubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “Would you just. Stick around. Don’t leave, okay?”

Hates this, so much and with everything in him. Can’t fucking escape it.

Zito makes a low sound, pushing his fingers on the window glass so that it squeaks. Mulder looks at him and wants to pin him down, crack his vertebrae on the sill, see him with shards of glass in his hair.

But Zito’s taking off his watch and putting it into his pocket, brushing the hair out of his eyes, telling Mulder, “There’s nothing here to leave, man,” and climbing back out the window. Soft footsteps on the grass, long shadow from the streetlight. This has happened before and Zito is silk-shirted, white-slashed sneakers, retreating.

*

They awoke on the floor, looking for all the world like they’d been beaten up. Mulder’s eye was swollen almost shut. Zito’s mouth was bisected by a line so dark red it was black. Mulder’s jeans gaped open, Zito’s still pulled halfway down his thighs. Zito’s arms were slung around Mulder’s back, but he drew away when Mulder stirred.

Mulder pushed up and placed his hand on Zito’s chest. Looking down at him like that, static filmed over his eyes and his mind, Zito was slow and kinda dangerous, hands full of metal in a lightning storm.

“Coffee,” Mulder said. His voice broke. “Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

He stood, fixed his pants. There were tiny red indentations on the back of his hand—from Zito’s fingernails, he realized. “Fuck.”

Mulder covered his eyes for a second, puffy bruised skin under his fingertips. Zito’s hand tripped up his leg, Zito saying his name low, but Mulder kicked him away, went to the kitchen. He put on the coffee, put his forehead against the cabinet. Sore and stiff from sleeping on the floor, he thought over and over again that they weren’t even in the same fucking league anymore.

“Hey.” Zito, close behind him. Zito with road dust still in his hair, split lip and his belt gone missing, Zito made Mulder want to sleep for days, lose his voice, steam-burn his ears until he couldn’t be expected to hear or answer questions.

Mulder turned, leaning back against the counter. Zito was at the table, brown shadows under his eyes. Stringy, soft-unwashed, wearing Mulder’s shirt with spots of blood on the collar, he had foregone the jittery out-of-focus shear of when he’d gone crazy. It was strange to see Zito with something like resignation in his face.

“What’s going to happen?” Zito asked him.

Mulder tightened his grip on the counter. “I don’t know.”

“Are you. I don’t think this is something. Wait. Because I just, I can’t.”

Zito trailed off, stared at his hands. Mulder remembered being held down, once or twice, big hands on his chest, his back. Wanting to come more than he wanted to breathe, and that hadn’t even been anything special, just a fucking Tuesday night in his room with the window open.

“What are you trying to say, man?” Mulder asked. Zito shook his head, weaving his fingers together.

“I kept thinking you were gonna get sick of it,” Zito said.

“That was years ago.”

“No, fuck, it wasn’t. That was, like, three _days_ ago.” Zito looked up, knifelike and fearsome. “You shouldn’t have let me leave.”

Mulder scoffed. “How’d I fucking know you’d turn this around until it was my fault?”

He turned, jerked cups out of the cabinet and rang them down on the counter. The clock on the microwave was blinking twelve o’clock, no sense of how long they’d slept, whether it was dawn or midday or evening, the gray light not letting them in on it.

“It’s not your fault,” Zito said. Mulder curled his hands into fists, watching the coffee drip. “But you still shouldn’t have let me leave.”

“What the fuck are we even talking about here?” Mulder faced him again, liking the anger than ran fast-red in his blood. “You’ve been waiting for me to get sick of it, fine, but I _haven’t_. And if I’d made you stay, I wouldn’t have gotten traded, right? And if I’d gotten a few more hours of sleep back in Cape Cod, I never would have thought I’d known you in the first place, and none of this would have ever happened.”

Zito’s eyes got big, his hands scratching at the tabletop. “I. You remember that?”

“Of course I fucking remember that. God.” Mulder dug his thumbnails into the heels of his hands. “Listen to me. We’ve been doing this for four goddamned years. I feel fucking ill when I don’t get to see you. It doesn’t make any difference how we got here, all that matters is what happens next.”

They were quiet. Mulder felt the house settling around them, creaks like moans and he was reminded of ghosts, the attic they never stayed in after dark. Zito was clenching his hands, pallored with his shoulders held tightly.

“I can’t do it if you’re not around,” Zito said eventually. He didn’t meet Mulder’s eyes. “All I ever had to go on was that you were still there. And you’re not anymore. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just bad luck, that’s all.”

Mulder wanted to hit him, make his mouth bleed again. Rewind years with each blow, until Zito was nineteen again and wet-haired, smiling at him in confusion. There was no such thing as time when the clocks are stopped. They could go back as far as they wanted.

But Zito lifted his head then and he’d already bitten his lip, bright red eking down his chin. Hard thing to see, bad wish come true, and Mulder winced. He turned his back on Zito and ran a washcloth under the faucet, stirring cold on his hands.

“Your lip, man.” He tossed Zito the cloth, slightly more at ease with Zito’s face partially obscured. Zito’s eyes cracked when they hit him, strengthened because Mulder couldn’t see his mouth.

“If we got through all the shit that’s happened,” Mulder said. “What makes you think we can’t get through this too?”

Speaking from behind the cloth, Zito answered, “I can’t spend the next fifteen years living for the off-season. And neither can you. It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Mulder said, watching the blood seep through the wet cloth slowly, transfixed. Zito took it down, left it twisted on the table. His mouth was damp and that wasn’t fair.

He could remember thinking at one point that Zito would never let him go without a fight, scratch and claw and shred all the way down to their end. Zito had never wanted things to be simple, wanted marks that he could use as evidence forever, but that was a long time ago. Mulder didn’t want things to change, and Zito still didn’t know how to live like that.

“I don’t think it is.” Zito let his hair fall down in front of his eyes. He was shaking. He’d always shown more on the outside than Mulder did, asked stupid questions and woke them both up to watch the snow. Mulder could call him crazy, faithless maybe, unwilling to believe in that which he could not see, but he knew that Zito had a right. Mulder never would have believed it either, if it hadn’t come home to him with such force.

“Anyway,” Zito continued haltingly. “Every bad thing that has happened to us turned out okay in the end. So maybe this is for the best.”

Mulder breathed out carefully, turned off the coffee machine. He lined everything up in his mind, four long years come to nothing and Zito on that beach with pieces of flame in his hair, kicking at his heart.

“Get the fuck out of here if that’s what you think,” Mulder told him, quiet enough to hurt, staring at the tile floor.

He waited, fingerprints chopped to slivers by the rough underside of the counter. He heard Zito half-moan, and saw Zito’s formless shadow rise on the floor, move swiftly out of the room. Heard the front door slam and wondered numbly what the fuck he was supposed to do with all of Zito’s stuff.

The day deepened. Mulder stumbled into the living room and it was like he’d been through a war. He didn’t trust the corners or his own senses. He checked his arms for new scars.

When he turned on the television to drown out the noise in his head, he was confronted by his own face, photoshopped into a uniform the same color as Zito’s blood on the washcloth, grininng back at him.

*

And so Mulder kills time in Arizona. He’ll kill time for the rest of his life, disabled for a long time now, for real. He hears about the wind in St. Louis knocking out plastic windows at the new stadium, keeps track of every team he’s ever played for. There are phone calls that come and go like faces in a crowd, like a dream.

Still in the edges of things, he can taste salt water. He wakes up to Zito’s broken watch on the night-stand, the T-shirt of Mulder’s that Zito mailed back in January hung on the bedroom doorknob.

Waiting to be strong enough to pitch again, not trusting baseball to cure him of anything, Mulder crosses off each day, blue and black ink on his fingers. He experiences useless impulses to burn old calendars, one for every year that he spent in Oakland. Like if he breathes in that smoke, he’ll forget everything that has gone small in the rearview mirror, like it’ll work as some kind of redemption. But he knows that’s insane, and he knows that this is not something he should have allowed to happen.

When the A’s are in Boston, unnaturally in first place, Mulder heads north. He packs ice in a cooler and the skin of his shoulder turns grayish blue. The black fields of the Central Valley reduce him to elemental parts, vision and motion and this idiotic idea that some day he’ll wake up without feeling worse than he did when he went to sleep.

San Francisco is muddied, caught in the middle of an incongruous midwestern heat wave. The temperature makes the buildings shimmer and fold, glass warping. The city feels hollowed out with both local teams on road trips, the stadium lights banked and as dark as clock faces.

Mulder finds Zito’s apartment building and he doesn’t know which window is his. He’s never been here before. Zito’s on the other side of the country and so shall he remain.

Mulder, unexpected and unrecognized with his cap pulled down over his eyes, Mulder doesn’t know how to make sense of this, all-night drive aching in his back, shoulder slowly thawing in the weather. Mulder is lit by streetlamps, his face tilted up.

And he’s down on the sidewalk for hours, tracing the ranks of closed and curtained windows, waiting without hope for someone who is not here to show his face.

THE END


End file.
